As you already are aware, due to my diligent investigations and conscientious opening of my emails, Melville House Publishing created the first ever Moby Awards for (the biggest thing to hit publishing since blurbs) book trailers. The best and worst winners are available here, and there is also some snippy
Ever since I read (in 1977) Thomas Whiteside’s exposition on tomatoes, entitled simply “Tomatoes,” I have used it as an example of 1) the discovery of a piece of writing on a subject I was not inclined to pay attention and, 2) another good reason the New Yorker is
Probably everyone knows someone whose predilection for collecting has gone off the rails and might be viewed as a pathological condition. (Consider the two daffy uncles in Diane Keaton’s 1995 film Unstrung Heroes.) Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, social scientists and scholars, have taken their decade-long research into what
One may view our encounters with sounds and silence as a quotidian matter, but as Patrick Madden quotes Montaigne in his collection of essays, “From the most ordinary and commonplace things, if we could put them in their proper light, can be formed the greatest miracles of nature and the
The notion of considering the happiness of the citizenry is not a particularly novel one (think Jeremy Bentham), though the burgeoning of happiness research appears to be a growth industry. These days the disaffected white people who are holding various anti-something-or-other rallies around the country seem to elicit at least
In my world, the build-up and anticipation for David Simon’s crew’s new creation Treme was hypertensive, culminating with the airing of the first episode on Sunday last. Perhaps the wider universe was preoccupied with the foibles of an errant golfer and hopefully paying some attention as the Catholic
Dwight Garner, who is a devoted book person, reader, and a columnist for the New YorkTimes, has assembled and annotated a compendium of 300 book ballyhoos, entitled Read Me: A Century of Classic Book Advertisements (Ecco). I had this tome buried in one of those K-2’s of books that
No surprise that we live in a world full of junk science, unhelpful self-help, and freakish social sciences—which makes culling the valuable from the vapid somewhat perilous. Not that my approval in these areas is should be construed as a warranty of validity. Fortunately, Dr. Louann Brizendine, whose credentials
Like many Americans, despite a nagging sense of better judgment and the guilt that follows from ignoring that judgment, I succumbed to unseen societal forces and purchased one of those new fangled televisions—which, of course, requires some kind of connection to the grid with its multitudinous and maddening choices.
I feel compelled to correct an oversight—a lapse in my steady gaze at the flora and fauna of the current literary terrain. Though some might argue that literature and other parts of life are all taking place in the imminent moment. Attention must be paid to Dave Daley’s
Tom Piazza, who has written well about New Orleans (his NOLA-based novel, City of Refuge, was the runner-up in last year’s Tournament of Books), is a member of the writing team for The Wire creator David Simon’s imminent HBO series,Treme, set in the Big Easy. (Anyone know
Even if you don't live in San Francisco, you will no doubt find out soon enough that Dave Eggers, recently of Where The Wild Things Are fame and continuously of McSweeneys' various enterprises, has published a newspaper. A $16 newspaper called the San Francisco Panorama. Eggers and
Amy Goodman, host of the useful and progressive radio program Democracy Now!, has recently published a collection of articles, Breaking the Sound Barrier (Haymarket Books, edited by Denis Moynihan) with an introduction by favorite whipping boy of right-wing loonies, Bill Moyers. Ms. Goodman is a well-known political skeptic and a
(Photo by Robert Birnbaum) Old pal and Hunter College mentor Colum McCann , author of Dancer and Zoli won the National Book Award for fiction for his exuberant recent opus Let the Great World Spin. Which at the least means future editions of the book will have shiny stickers disquieting the
One of the more poignant scenes in Bernardo Bertolucci's film The Conformist (based on the Alberto Moravia novel of the same name) has the character Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) recalling his father's account of living in Munich in 1923 and encountering a diminutive, mustachioed man who
Despite something approximating my best efforts, many venues for book information continue to propagate the silly notion that there is such a thing as summer reading. This is such a widespread contagion—most in evidence by the locust-like droning of lists purporting to contain summer books—that if there was
