At some point, someone will probably fabricate one of those pop-sociology books about the generation that is averse to reading instruction manuals: The Dummies' Guide to Dummies. (Who is buying all those self-help books and keeping windbags like Tony Roberts in silk?) As I belong to that
National Book Award-winning writer Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) occupies an anomalous place in the melee that passes for the American literary culture. Viewed as a prickly sort and outsider (he lives in Northern Idaho and passed on attendance to the N.B.A. awards ceremony), Johnson's
Stories attach themselves to all manner of things, and occasionally those stories rise to some level of perpetuity. I wish I had a dramatic story for how I came to read Nick Antosca's disturbing, riveting, and eerie second novel, Midnight Picnic (Word Riot Press). For all I know,
I first became aware of Uruguayan writer, activist, and dog loverEduardo Galeano about 20 years ago through Lawrence Weschler's investigations of the amnesty movements in Brazil and Argentina during their post-military dictatorship years (Weschler's work culminated in his book, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts
Canadian poet and occasional novelist Anne Michaels, whose first novel, Fugitive Pieces, was internationally lauded and awarded, returns some 12 years later with a sophomore effort every bit as engaging. The Winter Vault (Knopf) is brimming with gorgeous prose and imagery—frequently cited as an example of, uh, “lyric fiction”
There was a time in the 1990s when turning to the New York Observer offered amusing and enlightening relief from the prevalence of so-called service journalism in the form of Michael M. Thomas and his column. (Thomas incisively pointed out that the new generation of journalists felt that reporting
David Foster Wallace’s suicide last autumn sent shockwaves through the literary world unleashing a torrent of verbiage, opinionizing, and hand wringing—it seemed as if anyone who ever read a book weighed in on the sorrow, D.F.W.’s legacy, or somesuch. How to explain the reaction? Wallace’
An April 1999 event at a Colorado high school should have changed the way Americans view childhood and child rearing. It did for me. As the parent of a young boy I can assure you that the harrowing and tragic events at Columbine High School, where two teenage students attempted
Alex Rodriguez stopped being interesting to me about the time he went from the Seattle Mariners—where he played with Junior Griffey—to Texas, where he was handed 200 million dollars to play baseball. Come to think of it, major-league baseball became much less interesting to me at about
While I am not a big fan of Oprah Winfrey, I don’t hold it against any writer that Oprah (who is not a tasteless dummy) may have brought them the immense commercial benefits that seem to accrue from her majestic anointment(s). Apparently, Jane Hamilton (A Map of the
