Give A Gift
MOST RECENT ARTICLES BY:

Sam Anderson

  1. excerpt
    The City Born in a DayNew York wasn’t built in a day, but Oklahoma City was, in a bizarre but uniquely American government-sanctioned raid known as the Land Run.
  2. 20 Philip Roth Books, RankedThe indispensable, the significant, the disposable, and everything in between.
  3. flight
    Anderson: A Review of Flight, the Definitive MJ BiographySam Anderson, the magazine’s award-winning book critic, reviews his magnum opus.
  4. The Greatest NovelInvisible Man, The Bonfire of the Vanities, or The Age of Innocence?
  5. The Year in Books1. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen (FSG) Franzen’s second juggernaut of the millennium is, admittedly (as its roiling crowd of detractors will tell […]
  6. American HustlersThe surprisingly parallel lives of George Washington and Jay-Z.
  7. Nowhere to RunAn insane tale of WWII survival. Starring an Olympian and an ungodly number of sharks.
  8. A History of Rap As LiteratureThe artists who flowed so fine they turned Old School rhymes into poetry.
  9. Straight Outta Comp 101A language dork finally falls in love with rap.
  10. books
    Jonathan Franzen’s National Book Award Snub Was No Snub at AllAwards, notoriously, mean almost nothing — particularly in literature.
  11. Knee-Deep in ‘Bovary’Flaubert’s obsessive masterpiece finally gets the obsessive translation it deserves.
  12. Big Sometimes Friendly GiantRoald Dahl—the storyteller as benevolent sadist.
  13. The PrecisionistJonathan Franzen’s Freedom illustrates, crankily, the joys of the old-timey literary novel.
  14. The James Franco ProjectMovie star, conceptual artist, fiction writer, grad student, cipher—he’s turned a Hollywood career into an elaborate piece of performance art. B […]
  15. The Mad LiberationistComedy’s spectacularly original Reggie Watts is guided by voices—and music and radio static and polycarbonates and robots and …
  16. The Return of Martin AmisA sexy novel about sex—and sex alone—has reenergized him, just when his fans were giving up hope.
  17. Family AlbumAnne Carson’s deeply moving scrap heap.
  18. Hi, RobotThe history of the vocoder, cryptography’s top-secret funk machine.
  19. Sage of the ApocalypseDhalgren, Samuel R. Delany’s loopy sci-fi masterpiece, lives to destroy again.
  20. Boundary IssuesDavid Shields’s new “manifesto” is a pain in the ars poetica.
  21. let this be a lesson
    The Best Writing Advice of the Best Writing AdviceSam Anderson picks the top tips from the ‘Guardian”s survey of Will Self, Neil Gaiman, Zadie Smith, and more.
  22. job opportunities
    Dave Eggers: Best Editor for The Paris Review?A blogger cuts through the speculation on the venerable publication’s new editorship with a boldly counterintuitive idea.
  23. feeds
    Anderson: My Literary Twitter ExperimentSampling the text-stream.
  24. kids these days
    Anderson: ChatRoulette Founder Exposed — and He Hardly Seems Evil at AllHe says amazing things like, “Bandwidth bills show sums which shock me as a teenager, but I am not very worried.”
  25. Derrida and YummyburgersWhen academics get personal.
  26. The Human ShuffleIs ChatRoulette the future of the Internet or its distant past?
  27. obits
    Anderson: A Second Chance for J.D. SalingerIt always struck me as unfair that ‘Catcher in the Rye’ got ghetto-ized as a slightly embarrassing young adult novel.
  28. White NoiseDon DeLillo’s latest brings us as close to pure fictional stasis as we’re ever likely to get.
  29. best of 2009
    The Best Books of 2009Sam Anderson’s favorite books of the year range from the super-short stories of Lydia Davis to the mammoth work of William T. Vollmann. All have obsession in common.
  30. The Stick ListNew York’s critics pick the television programs, books, movies, art, architecture, plays, and pop albums that we’ll still be talking ab […]
  31. When Lit Blew Into BitsThe meganovel shrank, even as reading itself metastasized.
  32. A Glorious MessNabokov never wanted us to read his unfinished last novel. Unless, thrillingly, he did.
  33. Social SalingerLiterature’s oddly companionable hermit.
  34. Hungry?The latest in a bumper crop of books about the ethics of eating animals.
  35. Mrs. LogicAyn Rand never got into an argument she couldn’t win. Except, perhaps, with herself.
  36. tracing
    Anderson: There Was No Tracing!Sam Anderson defends himself against libelous, treasonous accusations of tracing.
  37. politics as unusual
    Anderson: Obama Averts a Spiritual WaterlooThe health-care debate had become so inane it seemed to prohibit the basic conditions of good speechmaking. My preemptive cynicism turned out to be both very right and very wrong.
  38. Intelligence ServiceHow Dan Brown feeds the brain.
  39. Sussex Chainsaw MassacreThe horrification of Jane Austen.
  40. Sam Anderson’s Want-to-ReadsWhat our critic is most eager for this fall.
  41. King’s ‘Dome’ TomeTo many fans, Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand—a mega-fable about the survivors of an apocalyptic plague—is his masterpiece. Shortly after it […]
  42. Incoherent ViceMy Thomas Pynchon problem.
  43. Moby-Dick in the DesertUnplug the phone. There’s a new William T. Vollmann book.
  44. Stalking the StrangerAlbert Camus and the pleasures of literary obsession.
  45. book report
    Anderson on the Ultimate Summer ReadA web-wide book club is discussing ‘Infinite Jest’ from now until September.
  46. Letterman vs. Mini-LettermanWhat will losing Leno do to Dave?
  47. In Defense of DistractionTwitter, Adderall, lifehacking, mindful jogging, power browsing, Obama’s BlackBerry, and the benefits of overstimulation.
  48. What to Read This SummerReality rules, even on the beach.
  49. Ballad of a NonagenarianHappy birthday, Pete Seeger.
  50. cheek by jowl
    Anderson: Poetry Month Showdown, Herrera vs. KleinzahlerThe thick-mustachioed activist against the grumpy contrarian!
More Articles