The presidential campaign is not anywhere close to full throttle and already it appears to be another dreary, droning TV miniseries, characterized by bad writing and even worse acting—it’s a close call whose performances deserve the hook more, the candidates, their campaign consigliores, or the braying and bleating
Three novels under his belt, Arthur Phillips sits down for a chat with our man in Boston about his commitment to fiction writing and, a challenge on quite another level, finding the discipline to focus on one piece at a time.
Anthony Burgess once described his ideal reader as “a lapsed Catholic and a failed musician, short-sighted, color blind, auditorially biased, who has read the books that I have read. He also should be about my age.” You can’t blame me for wondering who is reading these snippets (besides
This new political moment, featuring candidates who are not angry, mean-spirited hacks spewing fear and loathing (Although Mitt Romney’s “Marching Forward into the Future” speech is its own brand of totalitarian gibberish) brings to mind an observation that I came across by Friedrich Nietzsche in Don Lee’s
From The Once and Future King by T.H. White: The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake listening to the disorder in your veins, you may
As Dec. 31 approaches, the year-end lists and other media devices for taking up space and time remind me that there is, of course, something useful to be said about the recent past. And that something useful will find itself in this space, when and if I resolve what
Not that I expect anything for such efforts, but a trickle of perspiration did break out as I pondered the pros and cons of participating in the year-end list frenzy. Faithful readers may recall I offered a best-of-the-year-so-far list in July to alleviate this
From Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster”: A totalitarian society makes enormous demands in the courage of men and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands, for the general anxiety is greater. Indeed, if one is to be a man, almost any kind of
From Joseph O’Connor’s yet-unheralded new opus, Redemption Falls, as his protagonist is escaping exile in Tasmania: not freedom at allancien regime Breaking It Down by Rusty Barnes Rusty Barnes edits the journal Night Train, one of those sparkling stars that complete the literary constellation. He has a
Norman Mailer died this weekend. I was a fan of Mailer’s and think I be may one of the few people who read his massive stinker Harlot’s Ghost. Nonetheless, I remember vividly the brilliance of Armies of the Night and how much it moved me. I remember seeing
