There are some writers--for me, Rick Russo, Jim Harrison, Elmore Leonard, George Pelecanos, Amy Bloom, to name a few--for whom the matter at hand is not whether but rather how much I will like their latest creation. To be honest in Russo's (Bridge of Sighs, Empire
Looking at Rebecca Solnit's body of published work--Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art--makes obvious her
There are probably a few handfuls of writers who fall into the unfortunate category of being designated writers' writers. I say unfortunate because it suggests an explanation for a lack of wide(r) recognition--though ostensibly it is meant as something positive. The late FrederickBusch seemed to be pigeonholed
I suppose if there were many American readers who were interested in the harrowing and haunting recollections of Haifa Zangana, an exiled Iraqi patriot and lifelong (since the '70s) resistance fighter, the tone and palette of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the Middle East might have taken a
To say the dreary miasma of orthodox socialism was additionally burdened with the psychotic tyranny of Josef "Man of Steel" Stalin cannot adequately represent the terrors and horrors of the Stalinist regime. Martin Amis, in his controversial Koba the Dread, drums up Robert Conquest's heuristic device
Shamefully, I must confess that while full of springtime ambition and whatever else is in that season that spurs us to grasp beyond our reach, I had intended to assemble a gaggle of poetry titles coincident with National Poetry Month--though that commemoration has about as much weight as National
OK, unlike everyone else in my generation, I was not at Woodstock. (Then and now, not exactly my idea of fun.) But as this week marks the 40th anniversary of the legendary cultural milestone, you will be carpet-bombed with endless blather and footage--unless you are sequestered in Guantánamo.
Meryl Streep's uncanny film portrayal of Julia Child in Julie & Julia (based on Julie Powell's Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen and Child's My Life in France) has now occasioned Michael Pollan's New York Times Magazine
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
