Lyrical Odyssey
Poet and novelist Anne Michaels puts together good words.
Robert Birnbaum
Queen Jane Approximately
Accepting writing as one’s profession allows one to indulge all manner of aberrant and/or unorthodox behavior (sometimes to or with other writers). Along with the expected impecuniosities, the great unwashed associate peculiarity with affection for the written word. Now this is not a wild habit in the scheme
South Beach, Not Hamptons
Former New York Observer columnist Michael M. Thomas does Miami.
Julia Alvarez
In the last decade of the 20th century, Vanity Fair—in what no doubt was a well-intended nod to the rising tide of Spanish-language and Latino literature—fabricated “Las Girlfriends,” a group portrait of authors Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez, and Sandra Cisneros. (I have since forgotten—
New Books About Cuba
You know a good chunk of time has passed when what was once viewed as aberrant achieves trend status and becomes simply idiosyncratic. For much of my life I have been fascinated by Cuba: the music, the politics, the food, the literature—pretty much everything. By the late 20th century,
Life Before Death
David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College is now in published form.
Elmore Leonard
Octogenarian writer Elmore (“Dutch”) Leonard has published more than 40 books, mostly novels, and about half of which have been made into movies—none more credibly executed then Steven Soderbergh’s iteration of Out of Sight (1998) starring George Clooney as bank robber Jack Foley and Jennifer Lopez as U.
J-Noir
Crime story writer Michael Connelly’s latest offering brings back cop beat reporter Jack McEvoy from what I consider the finest of his 20 novels, The Poet, a standalone story that leaves aside Connelly’s long-running L.A. homicide detective Harry Bosch series—though the lethal serial killer the
Price Is Right
Considering the marginal contribution literary fiction makes to the commercial publishing engine’s so-called bottom line, I am ever astounded so many literary biographies, writers’ memoirs, and authors’ correspondences are published. In the fullness of time I expect to talk about some recent literary marginalia, but in the meantime
Impact
Ten years later, a journalist tries to decipher the motives at Columbine.