To begin with, Peter Dexter (Train), author of the award-winning and memorable novel Paris Trout (and a fistful of other excellent novels), has penned the funniest dust-jacket biography that I can remember (a creative opportunity most authors eschew): Pete Dexter began his working life with a U.S.
Not exactly a household name (except in certain effete and cultivated households) thespian (his credits include over a hundred movie and TV appearances--My Dinner With Andre, Shadows and Fog, Toy Story, The Princess Bride, Life on Mars among them) playwright (The Designated Mourner and The Fever) Wallace Shawn, scion
There are some writers--for me, Rick Russo, Jim Harrison, Elmore Leonard, George Pelecanos, Amy Bloom, to name a few--for whom the matter at hand is not whether but rather how much I will like their latest creation. To be honest in Russo's (Bridge of Sighs, Empire
Looking at Rebecca Solnit's body of published work--Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art--makes obvious her
By now if you have any interest in American history or Abraham Lincoln, you are aware that 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth, and naturally there is a gush of books adding to the already voluminous Lincoln bibliography. I have already dealt with a few of these tomes
If there is a blacker mark of shame on the history of American governance (the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans notwithstanding), I am open to considering it. (Local so-called riots--Tulsa, Rosewood--don't qualify as they did not have federal government complicity.) The
There are probably a few handfuls of writers who fall into the unfortunate category of being designated writers' writers. I say unfortunate because it suggests an explanation for a lack of wide(r) recognition--though ostensibly it is meant as something positive. The late FrederickBusch seemed to be pigeonholed
I suppose if there were many American readers who were interested in the harrowing and haunting recollections of Haifa Zangana, an exiled Iraqi patriot and lifelong (since the '70s) resistance fighter, the tone and palette of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the Middle East might have taken a
Naturally, my recent roundup of books on Cuba missed a couple of important contributions to that magical island nation's bibliography. Alongside Ned Sublette's seminal Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Cuban saxophonist-turned-historian Leonardo Acosta's Cubano Be Cubano
Personally, the realization that much of what is hailed as fashion is actually fecal matter came as I noticed that recent sunglasses design (always a bellwether accessory) made people's visages resemble large houseflies. That and the incessant chirping of various augmented mutant rodents at the de rigueur red
