Short fiction is on my mind today. Michigan mortician turned writer/poet Thomas Lynch (The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade), whose family business most certainly has allowed him to view life from a most unusual perspective, has a new opus, Apparition & Late Fictions, his first venture into
One ought not fault Amy Bloom’s admirers for pushing at the limits of sensible praise as one such does in describing Bloom’s new book, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Random House) as “beautifully astute.” Not exactly a coupling of words that sings. If you have followed
Nick Tosches’s restless curiosity trods a wide literary terrain, and his formidable talents cross boundaries and barriers that might restrain lesser minds. He has written extraordinary (and perhaps definitive) profiles of Jerry Lee Lewis in Hellfire and Dean Martin in Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams
Mississipian Steve Yarbrough’s Prisoners of War is a novel to which I regularly make reference as one that is vastly underappreciated—though now having read four of his novels, I want to suggest that this Southern storyteller deserves a wider readership. And it is possible that his newest effort,
As you probably have read at this site and many other venues, my valued mentor and dear friend Howard Zinn has passed away. It is some small evidence of his enormous energy and commitment to his calling that even as he approached his ninth decade Howard was still crisscrossing the
Photography historian and curator Gail Buckland, whose The Magic Image (with Cecil Beaton) is a seminal history of photography and one of her dozen highly regarded books on photography, adds a new volume to her oeuvre, Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present (Knopf). She
Chicago-born writer John McNally (America’s Report Card, The Book of Ralph, The Ghosts of Chicago), who teaches at Wake Forest University and thankfully has not gone native by embellishing his name, southern-style—as in John Bob or Jack Ed or some such—has published his fourth novel,
Last week I had a pleasant and stimulating conversation with Nick Flynn whose new book made mention of and was influenced by Rebecca Solnit’sA Field Guide to Getting Lost. That same day the very valuable web site Tomdistpatch.com published an eloquent and astute view of the current Haiti
That portion of the human community that self-assigns itself the task of reminding all of us the lowly values of the human species and regularly intones and scolds “I told you so” with every disaster, natural or manmade (its obvious we can include that disingenuous popinjay, Pat Robertson) is
Dismissing the misplaced use of the superlative in the title, this first anthology of European fiction (which proposes to be annual) depends for its credibility on its editor, Sarajevo-born Aleksandar Hemon (The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project). The fact that he has received the imprimatur of
