Email Author Zach Baron

2009 Stories by Zach Baron

• The Decade's Best Books

  published December 22, 2009

  Best of the Fallen First, those no longer with us. W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001)—published two months before the... More >>

• Nabokov, Meet 50 Cent: Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind

  published November 10, 2009

  Those who have been paying attention to Zadie Smith since her White Teeth debut likely already know about her affinities for E.M.... More >>

• Lore Segal, Rudy Wurlitzer, and Luc Sante (Re)visit Those Dazed '70s

  published November 3, 2009

  "Lucinella is my name. I wear glasses." This is how the eponymous protagonist of Lore Segal's 1976 novella introduces herself, when we meet her... More >>

• Michael Jackson Documentary, Redux: This Is It

  published October 27, 2009

  Less documentary than closely and manipulatively edited homage to the new-agey “genius” of frequent Michael Jackson... More >>

• Lydia Davis Is Not Indignant

  published October 6, 2009

  What to do with all the empty white space that drifts over the 733 pages and nearly 200 fictions of The Collected Stories of Lydia... More >>

• The Mountain Goats Get Biblical

  published October 6, 2009

  The Life of the World to Come's "Psalms 40:2," in which a gang of human highway flares break into a Missouri chapel and leave it in... More >>

• Lit Seen: A Report From the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival

  published September 15, 2009

  It's helpful to remember—as Rolling Stone's David Lipsky did Sunday at the Brooklyn Book Festival—that the panel which began... More >>

• Jay-Z's Midlife Crisis Is Over

  published September 8, 2009

  OK, so he speaks in yoga metaphors and describes wealth that regular humans can't hope to comprehend. Auh! His late career adjustments... More >>

• 'Mondo Fandom' at Anthology

  published September 1, 2009

  The road of the Kiss tribute band runs through New Britain, Wallington, and Nyack, and is hard. The road of the Elvis impersonator, with its... More >>

• Lit Seen: Momus, Joe Pernice, and Nick Cave Trade Guitar Picks for Pens

  published August 25, 2009

  If the phenomenon of rock-star fiction can be said to have had a golden age, it was a short-lived one. In 1964, John Lennon published In His... More >>

• Surf Noir: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

  published August 4, 2009

  Slot Inherent Vice in with The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland—the other rock 'n' roll Pynchon novels in which... More >>

• Irish Novelist Nick Laird Goes Utterly Pug

  published July 15, 2009

  At the Happy Ending Reading Series, which takes place at Joe's Pub these days, authors are encouraged to "take public risks." In practice, this... More >>

• Apocalypse Sometime: Ron Currie Jr.'s Everything Matters!

  published June 24, 2009

  In Ron Currie Jr.'s 2007 debut novel God Is Dead, the author imagined a world in which God, stymied by an implacable "polytheistic... More >>

• Lit Seen: A Heavy Rotation Playlist

  published June 17, 2009

  Writing about music for a living has long ranked, prestige-wise, somewhere between dealing drugs and prostitution—the operative... More >>

• COME AS YOU ARE

  published June 17, 2009

  The weird, rarely sighted Brooklyn trio Mr. Dream make blunt, devolved songs about cult movies from the early '90s and cult bands from the... More >>

• COME AS YOU ARE

  published June 17, 2009

  The weird, rarely sighted Brooklyn trio Mr. Dream make blunt, devolved songs about cult movies from the early '90s and cult bands from the... More >>

• Diamonds Are Whatever: Clancy Martin's How to Sell

  published May 20, 2009

  Bobby Clark, the protagonist of Clancy Martin's debut novel, How to Sell, is a handsome teenage truant with great teeth, a bad influence... More >>

• Lit Seen: James Hannaham's God Says No; Mark Z. Danielewski Exposed at PEN Fest

  published May 13, 2009

  James Hannaham and I decide to meet one rainy Friday afternoon in a polished, low-lit midtown hotel, where the men's bathroom is supposed to be... More >>

• Soul Sonic Summer: Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor

  published April 29, 2009

  Nothing much happens in Colson Whitehead's semi-autobiographical fourth novel, Sag Harbor, a valedictory ode to a 15-year-old black kid... More >>

• Lit Seen: The Unlikely Triumph of Two Dollar Radio; Bookforum Busts the Boom

  published April 22, 2009

  Technically, the small, Ohio-based imprint Two Dollar Radio got its start after a 2003 cross-country car ride, during which fellow NYU... More >>

• Asher Roth, Upper-Middle-Class and Rising

  published April 22, 2009

  It's already hard to remember the moment, but Asher Roth—the 23-year-old white rapper from the Philadelphia suburbs whose major-label... More >>

• Guy Maddin Revisits His Frozen Horse Heads

  published April 15, 2009

  Guy Maddin's 2008 docu-fantasia My Winnipeg was an uneasy combine of fact and fiction, autobiography and civic history—"What if I... More >>

• Lit Seen: John Updike and John Leonard, Writers at Rest

  published March 25, 2009

  Easy enough to find all manner of thoughtful eulogy in the pages of Endpoint, John Updike's final suite of poems, mostly written on the... More >>

• Mary Gaitskill's Trapdoors and Mirror Balls

  published March 18, 2009

  Mary Gaitskill's Veronica (2005) was a tricky novel about a tricky past, its main character a forcibly retired model, haunted by old... More >>

• Spring Guide: Wells Tower Offers A Strange Way To Squeeze A Dog

  published March 18, 2009

  "I actually don't think i'm somebody with abiding zoological preoccupations," says Wells Tower, who looks a little stricken as we parse the... More >>