- "Dissecting a Trial of Love, Hate and Human Despair" for The Jewish Daily Forward (Online)
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May 2011
"In October 2007, a crime rocked the clannish, insular community of Bukharan Jews settled in the Forest Hills section of Queens. Bukharan Jews, descended from a mysterious Asian pottage of influences, are thought by some to be a lost tribe of Israel, and speak a language called Bukhori, of Tajik-Farsi origins…"
- "Gunland" for 5280 Magazine (Online)
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June 2009
"Inspired by his late father's antique pistol, author, urbanite, firearm novice (and skeptic) Eli Gottlieb traveled through Colorado to figure out why guns still hold such fascination.…"
- "Western Union" for 5280 Magazine (Online)
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October 2008
"Like most boys, I grew up worshipping guns. Born into the era before the video game and the pixel-easy murder of a million people a day, I passed my adolescence playing old-fashioned war with my friends…"
- "Spankers" for 5280 Magazine (PDF)
2011
"My girlfriend had always had a flair for the biting put-down. As she stood at the threshold of the door to our rented apartment that fateful day, bags packed, she delivered her final volley…"
- Essaylet on Saul Bellow/Delmore Schwartz, The Millions Blog(No Longer Available Online)
December 20, 2007
"Once every few years, usually when I'm beginning a new book, I reread one or two of Saul Bellow's novels to prime the pump. This year it was Humboldt's Gift, the last great work in the high Belovian style…"
- "Tools of His Trade", Article in 5280 Magazine(Online)
December 2007
"In one of the drawers of my Boulder home is an ancient document, foxed and brittle with age. Removing it from my desk drawer, I slowly unroll it…"
- Introduction to Tobias Wolff(Online)
September 21, 2007
"First of all, I want to say what an honor it is to share the stage with Tobias Wolff, who is—not to mince words—a hero of mine. That’s a heavy word, hero. It happens in this case to be true…"
- "The Irresistible Sway," Article in Lincoln Center Theatre Review (Online)
Spring 2005, Issue 40
"When I first returned to America after living in Italy for three years, my friends told me the shape of my head had changed. As laughable as this may sound, I think they were onto something. My cranium was certainly the same dimensions as previously, but they were correct in observing that I'd changed deeply, organically, even metabolically, while I was away…"
- Carrion Birds(PDF)
Unpublished article written in 2003
"The first impression of Roman traffic, seen from the city’s natural epicenter of Piazza
Venezia, is of a scene of hand to hand wheeled combat, a laboratory of internal
combustion Darwinism where lumbering buses and trucks are under constant
evolutionary assault by darting, quicksilvery scooters and tiny cars. The roar is
apocalyptic…"
- Nobel Laureate Grazia Deledda(PDF)
Speech delivered in her honor in Nuoro, Sardinia, 2001
"I’d like to begin my remarks by stating at the outset that I am here in the role of
an American writer, a novelist, and not, I’m afraid, a scholar. Now, when a novelist
reads other novelists in his own language, he does so not only for pleasure, but for
another less noble reason: to borrow, or to put it more plainly, to steal…"
- Speech (in Italian) introducting a Guide to Modern Roman Architecture(PDF)
Delivered at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2001
"Perdonatami se devo leggere il mio interventino stasera, ma il terrore di
rivolgermi ad una platea in una lingua non mia lo rende necessario. Sono qua
per parlarvi della Guida di Roma Moderna, dal mio punto di vista di dilettante
Americano…"
- Modern Roman Architecture(PDF)
Unpublished article fragment written in 2000
"Most people come to Rome for one of a handful of obvious reasons: the
gorgeous antiquities, the museums, the fountains and the shopping, the local cuisine,
or for an experience of that hard to define thing known as Romanness which includes
a certain dash and deviltry, a certain Mediterranean style and flair…"
- "Vintage Weinberger," A review written by Eli Gottlieb for The Village Voice
(PDF)
May 1996
"On his own, quietly and steadily well off to the side of the canonical turf wars of the last few years, Eliot Weinberger has been amassing an oeuvre of supple prose writings on the linkages of literature, translation, the visual arts, global politics, and myth which is both of deep diagnostic usefulness at the current moment and provides a jolt of rare literary pleasure into the bargain…"
- Commentary on the Poetry of Peter Cole, Conjunctions Magazine(Online)
CONJUNCTIONS:21 Fall 1993
"No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine," wrote Herman Melville on his trip there in 1857, "Particularly Jerusalem. To some the disappointment is heart sickening … " The poetry of Peter Cole might be considered an elaborate marginalia to this diaristic comment of Melville's, marginalia wherein optimistic disillusionment, or religious realism, takes shape…"
- Review on Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann for The Village Voice Literary Supplement (PDF)
February 1992
"Having already published a short story collection and two fat novels distinguished as much for their whopping assemblages of arcane data as for their flights of casually incandescent prose, William Vollmann, at the tender age of 32, bids fair to become our very own Diderot—a fleet Encyclopedist of the Information Age who writes with equal diagnostic fire on postcolonial politics, punk rockers, electricity, bugs, and Viking history…"
- "Passion Prose" for Elle Magazine (PDF)
1991
"Ever since that moment in the history of neolithic chivalry when a love-smitten swain first took his favorite cavegirl for a walk in the woods while grunting in a way that more or less signified, “Look up at the beauty of the night sky, my darling,” romance has been a boom field…"
- "American Essayist," for The Jerusalem Post Magazine(PDF)
July 28, 1989
"THE PERSONAL essay has always ranked among the most democratic and forgiving of literary forms, available in theory to anyone with sufficient resources to muster an interesting written voice. In recent years, however, the genre has metastasized with bewildering speed and variety…"
- Review of Junot Diaz, Boston Review(Online)
"If it is true, as is often said, that cultures speak loudest at their moment of their assimilation, then it should come as no surprise that America, with its seemingly limitless powers of cultural absorption, is so rich with the ghost-voices of other nations. American English, the language in which those voices are expressed, is correspondingly less a standardized usage, imposed from on high, and more a consensual form of national practice, shaped by waves of immigrants leaving their particular palm-prints on the texture, nuance, and velocity of our national lexicon…"