Books by Sven Birkerts and Complete Book Reviews

Sven Birkerts, Author . Viking $24.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-670-03109-2
The literary world isn't lacking for memoirs about growing up, especially lately, but it could certainly use more like Birkerts's. Author of The Gutenberg Elegies, Birkerts presents here a collection of essays about life as the offspring of...
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Sven Birkerts, Author . Graywolf $12 (194p) ISBN 978-1-55597-489-3
Respected critic Birkerts has written an insightful appreciation of the memoir form, works that occupy a “growing... place in our literary culture.” Analyzing five ways different writers have chosen to transform their memories into...
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Sven Birkerts, Author Graywolf Press $16 (191p) ISBN 978-1-55597-464-0
Previously published in the American Scholar, the Believer and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others, these critical responses address a group of novels-including The Catcher in the Rye, The Good Soldier and The Moviegoer-that chart the ""topog
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Sven Birkerts, Author Ballantine Books $19 (248p) ISBN 978-0-449-91009-2
In his jeremiad, literary critic Birkets predicts that the information superhighway will lead to an erosion of language and a diminishing of sustained critical thought. (Nov.)
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Sven Birkerts, Author William Morrow & Company $20.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-688-07113-4
If recent fiction consisted exclusively of American postmodernists, modern literature would be in deep trouble, contends Birkerts. In this latest gathering of brilliant essays, he examines the decline of humanist faith, a theme that links an...
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Sven Birkerts, Author William Morrow & Company $25 (413p) ISBN 978-0-688-10612-6
Birkerts's ( The Electric Life ) case against the main trend in contemporary American fiction need only be stated to be persuasively argued against: that the postmodern reality is a blight for writers. Today's novelist contends with a ``depersonalizi
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Sven Birkerts, Author Faber & Faber $22.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-571-19849-8
In this engaging, cautionary look at the impact of modern technology on literary tradition, critic Birkerts warns that the information superhighway poses dire challenges to the vitality of literary criticism. In 15 original essays on the art of...
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Sven Birkerts. Graywolf, $15 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-55597-593-7
In 45 short pieces, noted critic and essayist Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies) sketches his life with an awareness that "memory does not obey time lines, but associations." Creating a web of often offbeat juxtapositions, Birkerts unveils the...
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Sven Birkerts. Graywolf, $16 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-55597-721-4
In this anxious and rapturous book of essays, all previously published in literary magazines, Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies) posits the decline of “literary reading” and argues that the importance of the individual—the subjective “I” so central to
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Sven Birkerts, Author, Maria D. Guarnaschelli, Editor William Morrow & Company $22.95 (459p) ISBN 978-0-688-07861-4
If poetry is organically linked to the speech idiom of its timeand if popular idiom is molded by television and other mass mediathen how can the poet fathom the age without sounding arch, mannered or deliberately bland? That maddening question is...
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Sven Birkerts, Author, Sven Birkets, Author David R. Godine Publisher $14.95 (430p) ISBN 978-0-87923-807-0
``If recent fiction consisted exclusively of American postmodernists, modern literature would be in deep trouble, contends Birkerts. In this latest gathering of brilliant essays, he examines the decline of humanist faith, a theme that links an...
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