And Then We Set His Hair on Fire

I recently finished Enchantments, a charming Italian novella by Linda Ferri. I picked it up serendipitously at the Harvard Book Shop on trip to Boston last month and loved it. Ferri co-wrote the script to the Cannes-prize-winning film The Son's Room.

In other news, I've made it to page 970 of War & Peace.

I'm currently enjoying And Then We Set His Hair On Fire: Insights and Accidents from a Hall-of-Fame Career in Advertising, a funny, delightful read by Phil Dusenberry, former chairman of BBDO North America. It's not your typical business read--it's actually quite fun, and, as the title suggests, insightful!

For a local book club of which I'm a member, I'm also reading Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond.

-Alexandra Tursi, visuals editor

The Vagrants

I enjoyed Yiyun Li's The Vagrants, and am now tackling Benjamin Rosenbaum's The Ant King & Other Stories. I also recently read Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers, and am now onto Duncan Wu's William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man, since I personally can never read enough Johnson or Hazlitt biographies.

-James Warner, assistant fiction editor

Birnbaum's reading list: Blake Bailey's bios, Canadian writer Joseph Boyden, and more

Comrade biblioistas,

I have read neither Richard Yates nor John Cheever's writings, but I have enjoyed Blake Bailey's bios--first of Yates and now John Cheever. I am reading a wonderful novel by Canadian writer Joseph Boyden, Through Black Spruce--which caused me to ponder whether I have ever read a bad novel by a Canadian writer--I don't think I have (I could elaborate, but I'll save that for another time). Also, I am easing through Cheever's Falconer and an amusing book by Alexander Waugh entitled the House of Wittgenstein, which is quite literal--it centers around a house Ludwig designed and built for his sister. Naturally, details of this nutsy and tragic (two siblings committed suicide) family abound. Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save, Lawrence Weschler's Shapinsky's Karma and Bogg's Bills and some David Foster Wallace essays round off my current reading. Galleys of forthcoming books by Eva Hoffman, Eduardo Galeano and Colum McCann are on the TBR pile.

-Robert Birnbaum, editor-at-large

Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

I'm currently reading Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, translated by Anne Carson, and thinking about theater and playwriting. I'm also working on translating some of Leon Bloy's short stories from French into English.

I also just finished Husband-Coached Childbirth, by Robert Bradley. My feeling is that the Bradley childbirth method is great, but the book is far less great. Repetitive, digressive, indifferently edited, and weirdly anachronistic - better to stick with a class.

-Summer Block Kumar, contributing editor