I am almost always enchanted by exile and expatriate memoirs of Cuba—from Renaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls (made into a great film by Julian Schnabel) to Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing With Cuba to Carlos Gensemer’s Snowing in Havana to poet Heberto Padilla’s tortured and melancholy tale.
Can you imagine today’s sports stars expressing the title’s sentiments? Former Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent assembles a riveting cast of stars of what may arguably called the golden age of baseball—Brooks Robinson, Billy Williams, Whitey Ford, Ralph Branca, Carl Erskine, Duke Snider, Bill Rigney, Robin
If you are unaware of McSweeney’s I’d ask you where you have been, but I realize its big, big world with lots of stuff to distract us. Anyway, this edition is about art and the art world—dare I offer the obvious observation that they are not the
It’s amazing to me how this story is still tiptoed around many years later. From the publisher: “Joseph E. Persico explores F.D.R.’s romance with Lucy Rutherfurd, which was far deeper and lasted much longer than was previously acknowledged.” Huh? And it might give one the chance
Like a handful of other writers (Elmore Leonard, Jim Harrison, Alan Furst, Colin Harrison, Philip Roth, Margot Livesey, and Richard Price), Thomas Perry regularly writes immensely readable novels, which in my experience have never disappointed. Despite his succumbing to the serial temptation with his bestselling Jane Whitfield books (which he
Hunter Thompson was sufficiently talented, charismatic, whacked, imaginative, and much more to warrant countless books. Credited with inventing gonzo journalism (as Gabriel García Márquez is with magical realism, neither of which exists outside the work of its inventor), Thompson offered the possibility of an American journalism untethered to PR operatives
Novelist Peter Orner (The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo) edits the third volume in McSweeney’s Voices of Witness series, an oral history collection of undocumented immigrants. No doubt they will never get the attention that cable TV blowhard and anti-immigration advocate Lou Dobbs garners, but this tome is
Nicholas Dawidoff’s previous memoir, The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World, told of Professor Alexander Gershenkron’s illustrious and much-traveled life. In his newest offering Dawidoff, who teaches at Princeton and writes for some of our smarter magazines, writes of growing up as
It is immediately apparent (as it should be) that this slim volume of poems is handsomely and thoughtfully designed. A nice choice of colors and type for the dust jacket and a sturdy shape that houses the 19 poems in Jorie Graham’s latest collection of ambitious poems.
Except for what I consider an unfortunate title choice (once having heard various versions—Nat Cole, Johnny Hartmann—of Billy Strayhorn’s masterpiece) that casts an odd shadow, this is Richard Price’s greatest novel. As a reader of his entire body of work, I didn’t think he could
