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All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel
Reviewed in this essay: All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel. Translated by Miranda France. Penguin, 2012. Continuing the perspectivist tradition of Wallace Stevens’s “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and William Faulkner’s four ways of looking at the Compsons, essayist and novelist Alberto Manguel gives readers five ways of looking at an enigmatic…
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On the Road in Jack Kerouac’s Hometown
Last summer, as part of a longer circuit of New England and Québec, my girlfriend and I decided to spend a couple days in Lowell, Massachusetts, a riparian city of just over 100,000 north of Boston. Home to numerous textile mills, some dating back to the 1820s, Lowell is known chiefly as beleaguered emblem of…
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A Little to the Left: LeftWords Festival Celebrates Alternative Authors and Publishers
To be publicly scorned by the infamous Glenn Beck is perhaps not such a rarity in this era. Still, for famed scholar Frances Fox Piven, who was recently dubbed “an enemy of the constitution” by the radio and television personality for her vocal involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement, such ire can only be…