Bradley Babendir

1 month ago | proteanmag.com | Bradley Babendir

As all who’ve tried it and been quickly embarrassed will know, it is physically impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You’ll find yourself remaining firmly on the dusty ground, tugging at your feet and looking hapless. The phrase’s origin is disputed, but what is clear is that its original meaning was a sarcastic way of saying something was impossible to do.

2 months ago | thebaffler.com | Bradley Babendir

Sun City by Tove Jansson. NYRB Classics, 224 pages. 2025. The first thing you notice is what isn’t there. Retirement homes and communities, as their euphemistic name implies, are premised on the denial of certain realities. Early in Sun City, Tove Jansson’s 1974 novel about one such place in St. Petersburg, Florida, she writes that you’ll “meet no children and no hippies and no dogs” in the surrounding area.

Sep 12, 2024 | brightwalldarkroom.com | Bradley Babendir

In Dog Day Afternoon (1975), a TV interviewer asks Sonny (Al Pacino) why he’s robbing a bank. “What? I don’t know what you mean by that,” he says. “I’m robbing a bank ’cause they got money here. That’s why I’m robbing it.” Many auteur directors—Michael Mann and Steven Soderbergh, among countless others—got big breaks and found massive commercial success with their entries in the heist genre.

Sep 14, 2023 | bostonglobe.com | Bradley Babendir

It started with a spreadsheet. Just three columns. Author and translator. Title. Date finished. Looking back, that last column was my first mistake. The goal wasn’t to read a certain number of books in a year. I wanted to have a list of the books I’d read for the normal reason that people keep lists: so I wouldn’t forget them. But I liked entering the information next to higher and higher numbers. I liked entering books with consecutive dates finished.

May 4, 2023 | bostonglobe.com | Bradley Babendir