Tag: Meakin Armstrong

For over 30 years, we gave Egypt the shaft, because it was in our national interest to do so. Now it’s time for Egypt to find out where its own interests are, without a strongman leading the way. The country has a difficult and terrible road to walk.

Our fiction editor’s theory on New York as a place of neutrality and a refuge from soul crushing lunches at Applebee’s…and his call for proselytizing Christians to leave New Yorkers alone.

“Call me the Great Rejector. But don’t take the rejection personally.”

The New Yorker is lauded for keeping the literary flame alive, but is that flame sucking all of the oxygen out of the room?

Given the recent major acts of idiocy (the BP fiasco), it’s about time we studied stupidity and kept the chronically dense (Palin & co.) from destroying our world.

Samuel Fuller had a pulp-fiction mindset and the former tabloid-reporter’s tendency to think in screaming headlines.

This film is melancholic, but still in love with the world and its magic.

Are others curious why Rush chose a female voice? I’m hoping this matter will be approached during the April 26 Guernica/PEN event where he’ll be a panelist.

I’m not going to lose my mind over this album, but it’s filled with songs I’m going to keep.

This story of two robots in love asserts that sacrifice is what makes love worthwhile.

The greatest living filmmaker you’ve never heard of.

Orson Welles, the true king of all-media.

Cringe comedy as only the British can do it.

Neither book requires its readers to be a fan of the star—and that’s why they are great reads.

I wandered around, and thumbed through the remaindered bestsellers and out-of-date guidebooks, when I came across The Magical Key. This particular edition had the illustrations by Maurice Sendak and its afterword was by W.H. Auden. What was this book?

Reading Erickson is like careering through space in a stunt car—the kind that jumps ramps through rings of fire.

“Since graduating school, no book has impressed me as much as Augie March.”

Read him for the same reason you might drink whiskey neat: to brace you and awaken your senses.

Laura van den Berg’s writing is spare and elliptical. Large topics are broached, but quietly and the stories stay with you.

This book is a weapon. It will teach you how to think.

On the gradual extinction of print journals.

Unleash your inner comic book geek and escape to the action-packed world of Zot!

Let Meakin reintroduce you to the screwball comedy!

Set in Sri Lanka, A Disobedient Girl is heart-wrenching and jubilant.

In The Children’s Hospital, Earth suffers an apocalyptic flood. Nothing exists anymore; no life, except for a floating children’s hospital, protected by angels…

Available again, is Robert Mitchum’s performance in The Friends of Eddie Coyle as an aging gunrunner forced by circumstances to snitch on his criminal “friends. ”

E.C. Osondu’s story in Guernica, Waiting, won the so-called African Booker—the Caine Prize for African Writing.

Padgett Powell’s Edisto, which takes place within sight of a beach, isn’t a difficult read—it’s propulsive and written with a light hand—but it’s also rife with all those harder topics that make the book worthwhile.

“I don’t fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future”—Patti Smith

Then you march, which means that you promenade toward the capitol, then around its back, ending up where you’d started in the first place.

Much of that Presidential power comes from proper use of words: “We have nothing to fear but ____ (finish the sentence).” “The buck stops ____” “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this ___.”

It’s time to stop the mindless praise of a mediocre man who blew a chance at greatness because he seemed to believe so strongly in civility and goodwill.