The relationship of writers to the Hollywood dream machine has been extensively documented--the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink even gave us a spoof of poor William Faulkner's stint writing for the movies. In the past few years, Jim Harrison has mused on screenwriting in his memoir Off
If you have read novelist John Crowley's fiction (Endless Things and Little, Big), his new opus may come as something of a surprise--as his penchant is for what some refer to as slipstream or interstitial fiction. Four Freedoms (William Morrow) is set in the early years of
Tasmanian (go ahead, tell me you know where Tasmania is) novelist Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist [which he dedicated to the beleaguered and persecuted Australian Muslim convert David Hicks]) joins a growing and welcome list of novels that have the illustrious 19th century English
The Cultivated Life (Rizzoli), a delightful anthology written and illustrated by Jean-Philippe Delhomme, is a thin tome containing more than 100 of the ubiquitous French illustrator's works. As is the case with many visual artists co-opted by various luxury brands, you will no doubt recognize the
At some point, someone will probably fabricate one of those pop-sociology books about the generation that is averse to reading instruction manuals: The Dummies' Guide to Dummies. (Who is buying all those self-help books and keeping windbags like Tony Roberts in silk?) As I belong to that
National Book Award-winning writer Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) occupies an anomalous place in the melee that passes for the American literary culture. Viewed as a prickly sort and outsider (he lives in Northern Idaho and passed on attendance to the N.B.A. awards ceremony), Johnson's
Stories attach themselves to all manner of things, and occasionally those stories rise to some level of perpetuity. I wish I had a dramatic story for how I came to read Nick Antosca's disturbing, riveting, and eerie second novel, Midnight Picnic (Word Riot Press). For all I know,
I actually lived through and participated in the era unimaginatively referred to as the Sixties--there was war and drugs and madness and dancing in the streets, assassinations and a presidential resignation and Woodstock and Watts, the Black Panthers, the White Panthers, the Grey Panthers, and, well, you know, a
I first became aware of Uruguayan writer, activist, and dog loverEduardo Galeano about 20 years ago through Lawrence Weschler's investigations of the amnesty movements in Brazil and Argentina during their post-military dictatorship years (Weschler's work culminated in his book, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts
Add the names of Bill Mauldin and Jules Feiffer to Ed Sorel, Seymour Chwast, and David Levine, and this group of masters will give you a Mount Rushmore of American illustration for the latter half of the 20th century and onward. I have already noted Mauldin's two volume
