Bracketology for the 2016 Tournament of Books
Announcing the brackets for the 2016 edition of The Morning News Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes.
Reading
A collection of 293 issues
Binge Reading Disorder
The typical American consumes more than 100,000 words a day and remembers none of them.
The Books
A couple’s decision to combine bookshelves supplies a series of revelations.
The End Isn't the End
When insomnia and technological convenience collide, a lifetime of binge reading reaches its full potential.
Harry Potter and the Shades of Twilight
A generation of women read the “Harry Potter” series as teens, “Twilight” in college, and “Fifty Shades of Grey” in their twenties. What is the cumulative effect?
Read It Again, Dad
Good books are frequently credited with being worth reading twice. But when was the last time anyone had time for that?
Token Anxiety
As New York City changes, so do its trains; our worries about life above and below ground move hand in hand. So which came first, the jitters or the subway?
Eat, Pray, Murder
Good book clubs rely on commitment, Sauvignon Blanc, and the pruning of members with annoying habits. Unfortunately, sometimes those members are homicidal maniacs.
Mikhail Shishkin
This is it, friends—the last round of our Reading Roulette series of contemporary Russian literature in translation, with one shot left in the chamber. But we’ve saved the best for last.
Anna Starobinets
Today we're launching a new series of contemporary Russian literature, with six stories in six months, including interviews with their authors, sponsored by Powells.com. Will one of them blow your mind? We begin with the "Queen of Russian Horror."
Sven Birkerts
Our Man in Boston sits down for this third conversation with author, critic, and book-world majordomo Sven Birkerts to talk about the current reviewing situation, the best books of 2000, and Amy Winehouse.
Now That Books Mean Nothing
When you’ve long been identified as a “literary type,” how can it be that receiving books as get-well gifts leaves you feeling empty, angry, and determined to chug YouTube straight?
America, You Are the Biblioracle
Today, from 2-3:00 p.m., the Biblioracle will use his magical powers to recommend the next book you'll love. Prior to that, a call-to-arms to save the plight of reading and an announcement about the 2012 Tournament of Books reader-judge contest.
I, Reader
You are what you read. For some, that means 22 boxes of books. Facing a storage crisis of bibliolatry proportions, our writer surveys e-readers and a life spent reading.
Reading With Scissors
If not for a tragic car accident in 2001, W.G. Sebald would be celebrating his senior citizenship next week. Recalling an obsessive introduction to the author's unclassifiable genre.
The Renegades
I haven’t read T. Jefferson Parker’s books for a while, though when I spoke with him in the mid-’90s I was favorably impressed with his writing. Along with Michael Connelly, Thomas Perry, Don Winslow, and Robert Ferrigno, Parker is one of a handful of crime writers who
The Life You Can Save
There is much anecdotal evidence to support the view that despite America’s vast riches (yes, even now) we are still in thrall to a lifeboat mentality. On the other hand, the nongovernmental response to disasters such as Katrina, the tsunami, and numerous earthquakes are a sign, as Mark Twain
Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
I recently noted British bad-boy photographer Martin Parr’s slip-cased, two-volume Parrworld:Objects and Postcards, the latter volume of which displayed Parr’s 5,000-strong postcard collection. Now comes a (relatively) new Walker Evans book—Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard by Jeff Rosenheim (Steidl)—and an exhibition of Evans’
Waltz With Bashir
Like Art Spiegelman, I have an aversion to the rubric “graphic novel.” Golden Globe-winning Israeli film Waltz With Bashir was first an animated film and now also exists as a 128-page book (Metropolitan Books)—novel, comic book—do you care? In both iterations it is a powerful story based on
Through Black Spruce
As I was reading and immensely enjoying Through Black Spruce (Viking), Canadian author Joseph Boyden’s newest opus, I came to the realization that I never read something by a Canadian writer that I didn’t find pleasing. That is a topic for another time, but Through Black Spruce reminded
Musing on Muses
I view those books concerned with writers’ love lives and how that affected their work at large with at least detachment and perhaps even skepticism—though unquestionably I respect the efforts in writing and getting a book published. In Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art (Yale University
Becoming Manny
The Manny Ramirez story seems to have a wider audience than just local baseball chatter, and may even go off track and venture into the quagmire known as human relations. Living in the belly of the beast—the heavily monetized snake-oil brand known as Red Sox Nation—I have been
Oxford Atlas of the World
Assuming you have not been totally co-opted and reduced to an incidental node in the circuitry of the faceless conspiracy known as the WWW, it’s possible you may have some feeling for the idea of a personal library. You know, real books, on some semblance of shelving or containment,
Ghosts of Chicago
Some years ago in a conversation with the then-ebullient Thisbe Nissen, a recent spawn of the famous (Iowa) Writers’ Workshop, I asked—as I am occasionally prone to do—if there was a writer I should look out for. Her answer was Wake Forest mentor John McNally. McNally (The Book
Poster Art
Except for movie and music concert art of the late ’60s (JZ Lynch, R. Crumb, Skip Williamson), posters have not occupied as prominent a place in American culture as in the rest of what is called western civilization—for some reason, Puerto Rico has refined poster art and reproduction to
Our Life in Gardens
No doubt in the publishing world there is a lingering hope that books specific in topic—bread-baking, quilting, knitting, bird-watching—have application to the broader project of the life well-lived—as in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Which is, of course, a most un-Zen-like precept. Things are what
Runner
Thomas Perry’s The Butcher’s Boy and Metzger’s Dog are two of the best books of whatever niche/genre in which you place Perry’s fiction. He is also known for a best-selling series devoted to Jane Whitfield, a woman of Native American ancestry whose talents and specialty
Get Lit
Luckily, only a quartet of so-called small (literary) magazines have chosen to subscribe me. Any more and I am certain I would have to start making ruthless and painful decisions about my reading queue. I see such magazines as the victory gardens, boutique vintners, and truck farms of America’s
American Rust
A few American writers have captured the desolation and despair of the areas in America afflicted by ravages of post-industrial decline—Russell Banks and Richard Russo come to mind. Now comes Philipp Meyer’s debut novel American Rust (Spiegel & Grau), set in a distressed rust-belt town near Pittsburgh, and
The Americans
Most of my adult life—what I will in my memoir (in progress) call “The Post-Graduate Years," I have, when given the opportunity, railed against the poor or lack of attention with which Americans regard their history. Except for a small number of re-enacters, scholars, and so-called buffs (most
Movies: The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Cinema's Hidden Gems
Though I hold no fondness for softcover/paperback books, I am enthralled by so-called pocket books, the dimensions of which are approximately four inches by seven inches. Perhaps I have been mesmerized by the mother of all such books, Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong or The Little Red Book, which
You
How does one wake up every day with a strong imperative to look for some strand of meaning from the frayed reality that relentlessly presents itself to our punch-drunk (collective and perhaps individual) consciousnesses? Wait, don’t answer that. My guess: by partially fashioning one’s own narrative with usable
The Jive Talker
These days Africa seems to be the epicenter of misery stories—if not the planet’s epicenter of misery. Which makes Malawi-born (kudos if you can point to Malawi on a map) conceptual artist Samson Kambalu’s memoir, The Jive Talker: An Artist’s Genesis (Free Press), a literary refreshment.
Lawrence Weschler
[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] Inclement weather may have scuttled my chat this week with multifaceted writer Lawrence Weschler, but I want to take the opportunity to bang the drum loudly about the republication and updating of his early works on Robert Irwin and David Hockney, as well as the rest
Scrapbooks: An American History
These days I must admit a preoccupation with matters of history and gloomy concerns about our country’s governance. Despite being a failed scholar of history—as in, lacking the cojones to take on a doctoral program—I still pay attention to historiography and accessible scholarship. I have in the
Our White House: Looking In Looking Out
In this current wave of hopeful historiocity (sic) comes a fine new book for children of all ages that splendidly arrays American history. The National Children’s Book and Literary Alliance conceived and curated Our White House: Looking In Looking Out (Candlewick Press), a collection of essays, personal accounts, historical
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
When Barack Obama mentioned 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper in his inspiring victory speech, he utilized a device (if I can call it that) suggesting the immediacy of history through the narrative lens of a very old person/survivor—which has been employed to excellent use in a number of outstanding
The Only Son
It makes good sport to speculate on the men and women worthy of placement in the pantheon of world historical figures. In the 18th century and beyond, Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of The Social Contract, has been awarded such stature—the French actually exhumed his body from Jean-Jacques’s chosen
Disguise
Sometime in the mid-’90s, in a conversation with British writer William Boyd, I offhandedly asked if he wanted to name a writer he thought deserving of wider recognition. “Justin Cartwright,” was his answer. I, with great singleness of purpose, went to Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop (sadly, the brick-and-mortar shop
Nemesis
Possibly the next fad in literature will see an upswing of publishing Scandinavian crime-story writers in the U.S.A. Stieg Larsson (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) has been hugely successful; Peter Høeg has a following here; and now Jo Nesbø (The Red Breast) reaches these shores with Nemesis
In the Devil's Territory
Sometime last year, I commended the George Pelecanos-edited The Best American Mystery Stories 2008, which included a riveting story by Floridian Kyle Minor, “A Day Meant to Do Less.” It turns out Dandy Dan Willett’s fledgling imprint Dzanc Books is publishing Minor’s debut collection, In the Devil’s
The Wasted Vigil
Afghanistan, frequently referred to as the burial ground of empires or somesuch, may well turn out to be Barack Obama’s pivot point to a second term—and the United States’s long downward spiral into oblivion. Based on his campaign assertions, he would seem be continuing the naïve view
Winter Reading List
The holiday (publishing) hiatus did not much change my reading habits other than two glorious days spent in total horizontal bibliophilic repose. I was able to read Louisianan writer Tim Gautreaux’s new opus, The Missing (Knopf), which doesn’t quite rise to the level of his gripping The Clearing,
Annie Leibovitz at Work
Annie Leibovitz is arguably the best-known photographer in the U.S.A. (Who else? Richard Avedon? Herb Ritts? Ron Gallela?) Based on years of service at hippie-qua-boomer journal Rolling Stone, where she shot 142 covers, and her ongoing work at effete boomer glossy Vanity Fair, as well as other such
The Mountain Meadows Massacre
One might wonder why three Mormon historians—Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Leonard—chose to investigate an unarguably black mark on the Mormon religion and published those results, some 150 years after the fact. Whatever the reason, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Oxford University Press) is an
Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting
Over Spanish painter Joan Miró’s (1893-1983) long and storied career he spent more than a decade in aggressive experimentation with material, media, and subjects--"I want to assassinate painting”—and it is the transformative period from 1927 to 1937 that is the focus of an exhibition at New
The Man Who Owns the News
Before I picked up Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff’s (Autumn of the Moguls) new opus, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (Broadway Books), I was dubious about wanting to spend untold hours finding out about the “secret” world of short-fingered vulgarian Murdoch.
Tinkers
Some months ago I received an anthology from a heretofore unknown (to me) publisher, Bellevue Literary Press. Apparently I have been blessed to remain on their mailing list, as I have continued to receive their offerings. Of late I am a fortunate recipient of Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate Paul
Books About Books
I am going to risk casting a pall of pedantry on this breezy corner of literary terrain and mention that late last millennium the term “meta” floundered onto the periphery of pop culture, even appearing in a space-filling essay in the New York Times Book Review. Apparently English majors did
The Ghost in Love
If I had not spoken with expatriate (he lives in Vienna) American writer Jonathan Carroll a few years back, I might be surprised that his online biography is bilingual (English-Polish); nor does it surprise me that, though he has authored nearly 20 well-received novels, he has managed to remain relatively
Demons in the Spring
A handsome volume by Columbia College (Chicago) mentor and Nelson Algren-award-winning writer Joe Meno (Hairstyles of the Damned), Demons in the Spring (Akashic Books) anthologizes 20 pieces of short fiction, some never previously published and each illustrated by artists, including Charles Burns, Ivan Brunetti, Archer Prewitt, Jay Ryan, and Cody
Guilty Reading
Whether it's political nonfiction, extraterrestrial erotica, or some combination thereof, we hold our genres dear. The TMN readers and writers reveal their favorite works from the back of the shelf.
Lincoln Logorrhea
Even before the grand finale of the 2008 election campaign, new books on the only other president elected from the great state of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, were much in evidence in reviews and bookstores. No surprise there, as somewhere in his forthcoming tome, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About
Poetry As Insurgent Art
Poetry As Insurgent Art (New Directions), a slender (90 pages), pocket-sized, clothbound volume with the title embossed on the black coverboard is a work in progress (the earliest version transcribed from a KPFA radio broadcast in the late ‘50s) by octogenarian poet patriarch LawrenceFerlinghetti. Ferlinghetti has been amending and publishing
The Chicagoan
As an expatriate Chicagoan living in benighted eastern Massachusetts, I can attest to the geographical affliction prevalent in these and other parts of the East Coast that are apparently blind and ignorant of the United States west of Philadelphia—this year being an exception given the importance of funny sounding
Voices in Chicago
I was searching for video of one of my last visits to Chicago’s Grant Park; that trip took place in August 1968, when Sen. Eugene McCarthy walked across the street from the Conrad Hilton Hotel and addressed the gathered crowd as “the United States government-in-exile.” Though I couldn’t
"Have You Seen...?"
Though he is the author of more than 20 worthy tomes that range over a broad literary landscape—novels, essays, biographies, histories—eagle-eyed cinephile DavidThomson is likely best known for a number of editions of the incomparable and valuable A Biographical Dictionary of Film and recently The New Biographical Dictionary
Best Thought, Worst Thought
Given the titans residing in the pantheon of aphorists—Oscar Wilde, Karl Kraus, G.K. Chesterton, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce—it takes a writer of high self-regard or no sense of history to attempt a book of aphorisms. Or like poet, editor, musician, and Scotsman Don
A Great Idea
The decision by the Christian Science Monitor to no longer print a hard-copy version got me to thinking about my reading habits vis-à-vis that great American news appliance, the daily newspaper—and I was pushed into a state of befuddlement, realizing I had not picked up a piece of newsprint
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity
In the end, it is difficult to view perennial Countdown “Worst Person in the World” candidate and Fox Network blabbermouth Bill O’Reilly as anything other than a blustering clown with a deep streak of the bully in him. Why then, you ask, have I engaged in the selfless service
In Memoriam: Studs Terkel
[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] Having grown up in Chicago I had the great good fortune to be introduced to Studs Terkel’s work early on—as well as the other Chicago wonders, all hidden in plain sight from the rest of America—Mike Royko, Ernie Banks, Curtis Mayfield, Sid McCoy,
Fred Astaire
The venerable and imaginative Yale University Press, which publishes a cornucopia of wonderful titles each year, including many groundbreaking art tomes (or so-called “coffee-table books”), has commissioned a series of monographs under the rubric Icons of America, of which—to give you a sense of its parameters—King’s Dream
Parrworld
Controversial British photographer and Magnum member Martin Parr, who was once derided by Magnum founder and photographic titan Henri Cartier-Bresson as “from another planet,” is also known as a collector and historian of photography books—he numbers his collection at around 7,000 volumes—hence the two volumes of The
Recently Read
I don’t know about others (though the common default explanation is some variation of attention deficit) but my reading habits have seemingly transformed into something unrecognizable to the Me of just a few years ago—perhaps even before the post-millennial chattering class preoccupation with announcing and sifting through the
Across the Agua to Managua, Nicaragua
Though never far from my thoughts, the Central American nation of Nicaragua, to which I traveled in 1989, does manage occasionally to penetrate the American cultural noise machine--most recently with a reissue of much-lauded photographer Susan Meiselas's monograph, Nicaragua. For me this is an excuse to revel in
Handmade Nation
In our heavily industrialized civilization, we have rightly placed a great value on handmade, original one- or few-of-a-kind goods. For Handmade Nation: The Rise of D.I.Y., Art, Craft, and Design, which is the textual offshoot of a film project due for release next year, Faythe Levine criss-crossed the
The Given Day
Though I am not an admirer or enthusiast of Boston writer Dennis Lehane, who is best known for the novel on which Clint Eastwood based his film Mystic River--I have never quite comprehended the plaudits he has garnered--I did appreciate his recent novel Shutter Island. And now comes his doorstop
Lost on Planet China
Which superpower regularly exports inferior goods, infiltrates other economies, has a questionable human rights record, and preemptively wars against other sovereign nations? Strong evidence can be presented that the U.S.A. fits that bill, but let's go with the conventional view and name the People's
Obscene in the Extreme
In some fashion you all, no doubt, celebrated Banned Books Week (Sept. 29-Oct. 6), the American Library Association’s annual celebration of the freedom to read. How, you are asking, might one celebrate? The A.L.A. suggests you read or reread one of the top 100 challenged books of
The Watchdogs
Apparently we are heading to an important election and many citizens and various aliens of all stripes, eyes, and ears are being besieged by the various soothsayers, talking heads, and comedians who make their living mediating American and world politics for the rest of us. Personally, I find our leap-year
George Grosz: Berlin-New York
Perhaps it is too obvious that the manifold pleasures of the world (as well all manner of infelicities, not to mention horrors) mostly come at you without introduction or warning. Max is a compelling film starring John Cusack as Max Rothman, an Austrian Army veteran who lost an arm at
Burning Down the House
It is not beyond reason to assert that the small segment of humanity devoted to the written word can be further divided into those who find reading as an escape or departure from the real day-to-day world and those for whom it is, in part, a lens with which to
The Killing Circle
As little attention as is paid to literature in the United States—apparently we have greater matters with which to deal—Canadian writers are rarely acknowledged (Alice Munro excepted) down here in the lower 48. Andrew Pyper has a good chance of breaking through the caribou curtain with his fourth
Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency
Like many right-thinking Americans, I have been sporting a 1-21-09 sticker on my front bumper for a few years. That date, enlightened citizens will acknowledge, is the last date of the Bush/Cheney presidency—an administration that has more than its share of tell-all tomes and Bob Woodward faux exposés.
On the Road
With nearly 30 books of novellas, novels, stories, essays, poetry, and food and travel writing under his ample belt, one might expect Jim Harrison’s name to have to have wider currency, at least among smart folks that read books. Yet, despite being translated into more than 20 languages and
Advertising and Art: International Graphics From the Affiche to Pop-Art
For those people who attempt to claim the world of fine art is distinct from the commercial one, sullied by filthy lucre and other crass venal motives, this book may be hard to swallow as it clearly and definitely exhibits the blurring of what arguably are archaic categories—though even
A New Life Cut Short
If you remember (as I do) or are not long removed from your reiterated adolescence—known, in America, as your undergraduate years—you will recall all manner of silly affectations, excessive tastes, and dramatic postures, soon overcome by the rigors and demands of so-called real life. For me, in that
My Life in Jest
When floating through post-collegiate limbo, you can use an anchor. Recalling when a very large book played a very large role in life.
The Aura Estrada Prize
As we have seen over the weekend, an untimely death (such as they are) of a prodigious young talent is a shock to the system. Francisco Goldman, who did great journalism in Central America in the 1980s and has written a number of well-regarded novels including The Divine Husband, suffered
Matrimony
One of the benefits of doing literary journalism is the sporadic largesse of book publishers; as a recipient of daily deliveries, one of the more fun and pleasing byproducts of that is the opportunity to pick a book at random from the towering biblio-stacks and dipping into the pages to
Nicaragua
There is an open question on what character flaw or personality disorder causes me to lord over people who don’t know anything about Nicaragua or at least where it is located. No doubt it will be given ample consideration in my memoir (current working title: Just Talking: How to
City of Refuge
This time around—it being an election year and all—a hurricane’s landfall stole the G.O.P.’s most recent thunder. This time, the threat of another deadly disaster got through to our lame-duck president and the major networks. And obviously New Orleans and the Gulf Coast offer
For the Thrill of It
Growing up in the shining city on the plains—Chicago—early on in my life I encountered the dark and shocking story of Leopold and Loeb’s crime: In 1924 two University of Chicago students, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., killed, with no apparent motive, 14-year-old Bobby Frank. One
Constructive Self-Criticism
In fits of attempting constructive self-criticism (also known as navel-gazing), I ponder the possibility that my disaffection with mainstream politics and my lifelong drift from left-leaning liberal to socialist to anarchist is mostly a result of my biography. That probably is supposed to matter, especially to people who think that
High Wire
[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] I was a reader of Robert Stone (A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, as well as assorted entries in Harper’s—one on Havana and one on the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans) before I knew anything
A Partisan's Daughter
Though I dipped into Louis De Bernières’s Colombian Trilogy (The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord) it was not until Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (the basis for an awful film by the same name) and a
Live Forever
You all know, or will learn now, that I admired Kurt Vonnegut a great deal—an admiration that began and lasted past my youthful, stupid years into my golden, stupid years. I was looking for some information about Kurt and stumbled upon a note from his daughter, Edie. Res ipsa
Anthology 101
Receiving an advance copy of The Best American Mystery Stories 2008—guest-edited this year by George Pelecanos—reminds me that Houghton Mifflin’s onslaught of its franchise The Best American Series anthologies is not far behind. What started in 1915 as simply The Best American Short Stories now has every
André Kertész: On Reading
The ubiquity of digital cameras and the avalanche of images whose lives are wholly lived on hard drives, as well as other aspects of 21st-century visual aesthetics, make black-and-white photography seem like some arcane ritual practiced in far-off time by god-artists named Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus,
Collections of Nothing
I suppose one might be amazed at the subjects that fill the hundreds of thousands of books published each year—and though I don’t want to sound jaded, I must say that I am no longer. Though, of course, many books give me pause for a lingering inspection of
Willie & Joe: The WWII Years
Cartoonists have struggled in the American culture for their rightful seat at the big arts banquet of popular culture—the big shift in their legitimacy can probably be pegged to Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus in the late ’80s. Back in the mid-20th century, parents who were
Books That Stack Up
Last year, when word went out that Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio were once again sharing the silver screen in a film based on Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, I was pushed along a path of once again coupling films made from important or at least imposing novels. Yates, by
Hit and Run
Based on an impressively large body of work and awards from people who care about such things, one can say Lawrence Block is a big thing in the crime story universe. But I came upon his work through a well-realized film, 8 Million Ways to Die by Hal Ashby (his
Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
A few months ago I was pleased to note James Sturm’s America: God, Gold, and Golems. Now comes a new opus and collaboration. Arguably, baseball is best consumed as a game for boys and girls of all ages and frequently attempts to make more much of it ring false
Tethered
Any number of things, mostly of a serendipitous nature, bring certain books into focus—life being very much a kaleidoscopic succession. In this instance, Amy MacKinnon’s debut novel, Tethered, is adorned by a colorized version of Toni Frissell’s wonderful 1949 photograph “Lady in the Lake,” which I first
More on Roxana Robinson
Roxana Robinson, who recently published a novel, Cost, with noteworthy blurbs and which received good notices and appreciative reviews, is a skilled literary fiction practitioner whose compact body of work includes two previous novels, three story collections, and a biography of painter Georgia O’Keeffe. None other than Robert Stone,
This Land Is Their Land
I must note that my sense of the people who are popularly characterized as conservatives—officials and pundits—is that they are not coherent enough to be judged as anything other than loonies and comedians and carnival barkers. I have in mind as the prototypical American conservative George Will and
Pause for a Fallen Companion
Despite a recent loss, I do have some books for you to heed. You can take my word for it—in any event, it’s the only word I am capable of at this moment—that they are worth your attention. 1. The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen
The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head
I have had the pleasure of speaking with Louis Begley three or four times—pleasures additional to having read nearly all his novels. Thus it is with great anticipation that I greet the publication of his biographical essay (a form I very much favor) on Franz Kafka. Zadie Smith enthuses
The Strong Man
If you thought Edward Meese, John Ashcroft, and Alberto Gonzales were shameful, you might want to take a short stroll down memory lane in this authoritative and apparently the first complete biography of Richard Nixon’s attorney general, who landed in a federal penal institution for his part in the
The Delighted States
It is apparent from Adam Thirwell’s (Politics) subtitle (“A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes”) that he means to have fun with this book, which is a
On the Laps of Gods
Some Americans may find the continuing revelations of the United States’s heinous injustice and craven exploitation shocking and distasteful. I find many of them, including the massacres at Rosewood and Tula, instructive and sobering. Historian Robert Whitaker carefully presents the story of race war in Elaine, Ark., and the
Shining City
I confess I am intrigued that The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley, who is not someone who features an outstanding sense of humor, wrote that he couldn’t stop laughing at Seth Greenland’s (The Bones) sophomore novel. The storyline develops as Marcus Ripps takes over his brother’s dry-cleaning
Final Salute
Rocky Mountain News reporter Jim Sheeler won the Pulitzer Prize for the story on which this book is based. Marine Major Steve Beck has the onerous task of personally notifying the families of U.S. troops killed in combat. Beck and his efforts to comfort the families make for a
The Spies of Warsaw (Audio)
I have already enthusiastically noted the publication of Alan Furst’s 10th novel. In a recent chat with the author, he mentioned the excellence of the audio versions of his novels. In this case, Daniel Gerroll reads this iteration of Furst’s fine snapshot of middle Europe circa 1937-38.
Swan Peak
James Lee Burke is a fine crime-story writer, and this is another one of his Dave Robicheaux novels. Most of them were set in New Orleans—which was an important character in this series—for obvious reasons, Dave and family have decamped for Montana and naturally run into thugs, gangsters,
Cost
Roxana Robinson (Sweetwater) belongs to a small but important subspecies of humanity who can translate their imaginations into vivid and compelling prose. In raw numbers their population on our planet is small—but larger than you think. As has been said in another context, the voices of fiction may be
The Journey Home
Having been published to accolades on distant shores, it took a while for Dermot Bolger’s harrowing and gritty depiction of late-century Dublin to make it to America (kudos to the University of Texas Press and its James A. Michener fiction series). Multidimensional storyteller Bolger gives us three young Dubliners
The Turnaround
Receiving a new George Pelecanos novel wreaks havoc on my well-ordered universe. I immediately set aside all but my most urgent responsibilities and appointments until I have turned the last page of his latest opus. Fortunately, his storytelling is of the page-turning species. In his latest tome, six D.C.
Rising, Falling, Hovering
As many commentators suggest, the idiosyncratic C.D. Wright is a school or movement of one, connecting the personal with the political (the war in Iraq, the post-Katrina debacle in New Orleans, illegal immigration, globalization/global capitalism) in her poetry. Here she gives us her 12th book, from which this
Moyers on Democracy
One of the puzzling aspects of the roiling cultural waters of late-capitalist America is that Bill Moyers, a mild, thoughtful, and well-spoken Christian, should serve as the feared left-wing demon whose presence on PBS indisputably exposes its liberal agenda. On the other hand, it makes sense that the crooks and
One Man's America
As a talking head, George F. Will does present himself as an arid and smug and, dare I say, tight-sphinctered Caucasian. His writing, though (except for his humorless desiccations of baseball), suggests a thoughtful, erudite thinker who is the class of the comedians, flying monkeys, and holy rollers known as
The Chattering Classes
It’s really noisy out there. “Conservative bloggers jab Obama on foreign languages.” (Huh?) Christie is getting divorced. There is a new cell phone. Angelina had twins. Microsoft cut the price of the Xbox 360. Freddie, Fannie, and Bernie Mac are a mess. Brett Favre wants to un-retire. There’s
W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose
Not being a fan of Guns N’ Roses, or whatever motherlode of music they mined, I nonetheless accept that the lead figures of commercially successful bands can’t help but have interesting narratives attached to their careers. Considering the mercurial Rose has reportedly been a Malibu hermit since the early
Worried Sick
Two things seem indisputable: American healthcare costs are irrationally inflated and Americans are not commensurately healthy. Nortin M. Hadler, M.D (The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System) has the requisite irreverence and skepticism toward medical providers and the healthcare labyrinth to write a clear-sighted
Mixing It Up
Man of letters and contrarian Ishmael Reed has a substantial body of literary work; this book anthologizes various of Reed’s op-eds for The New York Times and Playboy. Reed writes: In the following chapters, I mix it up with the media bullies. Lewis Hyde, before a meeting of the
The Radical Jack London
Jack London, best known for his beloved dog tales, The Call of the Wild and White Fang, was a deeply committed progressive voice, and this anthology makes a good argument for refreshing his relevance as a polemicist. Much-published Paul Berman, an aspirant to similar progressive credentials, blurbs: “Jack London always
Where Three Roads Meet
This latest edition of Canongate’s Myth series has Sigmund Freud conversing with blind prophet Tiresias as he lays dying of cancer. In addition to Freud’s drugged retrospective, the Oedipal complex/myth is grist for this mill.
Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams
As the title indicates, this 500-plus-page tome is taken from the notebooks that cinema titan Fellini kept by his bedside for more than 30 years. The director of classics La Dolce Vita, Amarcord, 8 1/2, La Strada, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, and I Vitelloni, Fellini, who died in
The World According to TomDispatch
If you have not been introduced to TomDispatch, the useful and informative web site edited by Tom Engelhardt, this anthology is a good opportunity to become acquainted. Among the many commentators in this book are Chalmers Johnson, Juan Cole, Rebecca Solnit, Mark Danner, Ruth Rosen, Jonathan Schell, Greg Grandin, Noam
The Drop Edge of Yonder
Small-press newcomer Two Dollar Radio offers up Rudolph Wurlitzer’s fifth novel, reportedly the author’s transmogrification of a screenplay of a modern-day western entitled Zebulon. The commentary on Wurlitzer’s first novel in more than 20 years finds critics falling all over themselves to commend this work. As in
The Complex
Historian Chalmers Johnson warns: Americans who still think they can free themselves from the clutches of the military-industrial complex need to read this book. For example, the gimmicks the Pentagon uses to deceive, entrap, and sign up gullible 18- to 24-year-olds are anything but voluntary. Nick Turse has produced a
The Pornography of Power
By any standard Robert Scheer, who currently edits TruthDig.com, is a highly regarded journalist working within the admirable tradition of American muckraking. Bringing his 40 years as a journalist to bear on an updated amplification of Eisenhower’s farewell warning about the military-industrial complex, Scheer offers what his publisher
The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri
David Bajo’s debut novel features mathematician Philip Masryk, who, despite two marriages, has carried on a longtime love affair with book conservator Irma Arcuri. She vanishes, leaving him her library of 351 books, of which she has written five: Within these volumes lay the clues to Irma’s disappearance
Slumberland
Paul Beatty’s Ferguson W. Sowell, a.k.a. DJ Darky, voyages to Berlin in pursuit of collaboration with reclusive avant – garde jazzman Charles Stone. His search in the exotic precincts of Berlin allows for an ongoing rumination on a wide range of subjects. Alex Abramovich observes: Slumberland
Open City No. 25, Summer 2008
Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas edit this Manhattan-based literary publication, and this edition features the usual buffet of unknown (to you) writers with a few exceptions—in this case the great Robert Stone—who contributes a piece of short fiction, High Wire. No doubt worth more than the price of
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
If you don’t own Vidal’s National Book Award-winning United States: Essays, 1952 – 1992, a compendium of his admirably provocative polemical prose exhibiting his vast erudition, you can dip into his amusing and well-honed unorthodoxy with this more-focused anthology. Jay Parini, Vidal’s literary executor, has selected 24 of
Sleeping It Off in Rapid City
Ten books of poetry form August Kleinzahler’s oeuvre—this edition samples from them as well as adding a few. Kleinzahler is famous (at least in poetry circles) for a Poetry magazine screed against Garrison Keillor’s middlebrow tastes—and more specifically his mediocre anthology of verse. One review quotes
What Cynthia Ozick's Been Reading
Cynthia Ozick responds to my inquiry about her recent literary encounters: Two electrician-boys were here yesterday, installing robust new wiring for an air conditioner, and keeping me from my desk; so I wandered lonely as a cloud along some lately unvisited shelves, and happened on a book that had been
The Osage Rose
Tom Holm, Native American scholar at the University of Arizona, fashions his debut novel in post-Great War Oklahoma, where oil exploration and exploitation were seriously at play. Ex-cop J.D. Daugherty sets up shop as a P.I., and he and his Cherokee sidekick, Hoolie Smith, are hired to track
One Minute to Midnight
In Churchillian terms, this was Kennedy’s finest moment. By most accounts, his handling of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was a judicious and even-handed bit of brinksmanship. Of course it probably would not have been necessary had Kennedy impressed Krushchev as a strong and forceful leader in their meeting
The Temple of the Wild Geese & Bamboo Dolls of Echizen
Tsutomu Mizukami, who died in 2004, was a prolific writer who produced all manner of books—novels, detective stories, biographies, and plays. The Temple of Wild Geese is partly autobiographical; likeMizukami was, the protagonist is raised in a Buddhist temple, which results in dire consequences years later. In Bamboo Dolls
Small Lives
Pierre Michon’s Small Lives was first published in French in 1984, and is now being republished by Archiplelago Books, a small press out of Brooklyn that specializes in “publishing excellent translations of classic and contemporary world literature.” About Michon, David Varno explains: The task set for Michon’s readers
The Pathseeker
For some years Melville House has published the Art of the Novella series, which is now supplanted by the Contemporary Art of the Novella series, of which Nobel laureate Imre Kertész is the debut title. Tim Wilkinson, who translated the work from Hungarian, points out: The Pathseeker,
10 Bad Dates with De Niro
This odd compendium of lists ends its 450 pages with Graham Fuller’s “Ten Christmas Movies to Save Us from Satan’s Power” (Fuller apologizes for leaving off Terry Zweigoff’s Bad Santa): Christmas Holiday Swiss Miss The Man Who Came to Dinner The Magnificent Ambersons Comfort and Joy The
The History of Human Rights
On the face of it, human rights is not exactly the most exciting topic, but in this historical survey (apparently the only comprehensive study of its kind), Micheline Ishay has reached back to the Mesopotamian code of Hammurabi and constructed a context with which to view the new, globalized world
America Between the Wars From 11/9 to 9/11
This book’s subtitle (“The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror”) aptly synopsizes its content, focusing on the 12 years of naive hope where it was seriously (we thought) suggested there would be a “peace dividend.” Considering this study
Democracy's Prisoner
The Eugene V. Debs story is a moving, albeit instructive one, though he likely will never be given his due as one of the great figures of American history. Jailed for speaking out against the so-called “war to end all wars,” Socialist Debs ran for president in 1920, garnering a
Beyond the Hoax
Physicist Alan Sokal is famous for his 1996 Social Text article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” written as a parody of postmodernism (it is included in this book). Of course, it caused much warranted fulmination in academic circles, as well as a stir in the
The Comanche Empire
There is some quibbling regarding the use of the word “empire” in Pekka Hämäläinen’s fascinating new history of the powerful and unrecognized Comanche tribe of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. Nonetheless, this highly original narrative details the tribe’s accomplishments and impressive geographical reach throughout the 18th and
Stop Me If You've Heard This
Jim Holt, who writes for a number of smart publications—The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, Lingua Franca, and then some—tries to answer the question, “What’s so funny?” Being the engaging and skillful writer he is, he is not obliged to succeed for this book to
House of Wits
A family that includes William and Henry and Alice James is an obvious motherlode of story, information, and speculation—all that remains is for Paul Fisher to build a coherent, insightful narrative about these fascinating siblings. Asked what is new about his James family book, Fisher explains: Until just a
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
The latest opus from Wang Anyi (Baotown) is set in post-World War II Shanghai, and traces the survival of ghetto girl Wang Qiyao, who is deeply impressed with the incandescence of 1940s Hollywood and must hide her “decadence” from the various ebbs and flows of Mao and Co.’s attempt
America America
Iowa Writer’s Workshop guru Ethan Canin (Carry Me Across the Water) has a number of well-regarded books under his belt, most notably his story collection The Palace Thief. His newest effort takes a scion of the working class, Corey Sifter, from estate yard boy to U.S. senatorial aide
What Margot Livesey's Been Reading
Margot Livesey—whose newest opus, House on Fortune Street, you should include in your to-be-read list—writes: When I was almost five my father married my stepmother and we began to spend our summer holidays in Pitlochry, the small Scottish town where my stepmother’s sister lived. There were four
A Conservative History of the American Left
Daniel Flynn (Intellectual Morons, Why the Left Hates America) pulls no punches in his survey of left-wing schemes, personalities, agendas, and movements. In spite of a clearly stated bias, he manages to inform and elucidate, even as he dredges up singular and worst-case examples of progressivism. The Nation review explains:
Dear American Airlines
A man is marooned at O’Hare Airport on the way to his daughter’s wedding, which he will now miss. He begins to compose a letter asking for a refund for his plane ticket—a letter that mutates into a review of his life and its misspent, wasted years.
Lush Life
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
Sea Change
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.
The Crowd Sounds Happy
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 an
Underground America
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 a
Outlaw Journalist
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
Fidelity
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
Franklin & Lucy
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
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern No. 27
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
We Would Have Played for Nothing
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
No Way Home
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’sDancing With Cuba to Carlos Gensemer’s Snowing in Havana to poet Heberto Padilla’s tortured and melancholy tale. Carlos
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories
John Kessel (Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice) is well regarded and noted in the speculative fiction world, extolled for humor and a crafty imagination. This anthology of 15 fiction shorts includes his much-lauded Lunar Quartet. You probably don’t know of him, which a fine reason for
Glimmertrain, Summer 2008
Many of you will no doubt recall that during the ‘60s, Oregon was a much-extolled destination for people seeking what was then (and perhaps now) considered a decent life. So much so that Oregonians wrestled with various methods of discouraging immigration—which if unchecked may have turned its idyll into
What Alan Gurganis's Been Reading
Tim Russert, in case you missed the news, has died. As he was a TV journalist, it behooves the U.S. news engine to dwell on and parse every aspect of his life and death. He was one of some magazine’s 100 most important people—which, considering how many
State of Exile
Self-exiled in the early ‘70s (in response to a military coup when her work was banned and her life threatened) Uruguayan writer Christina Peri Rossi wrote these poems during her first years in Spain—apparently they were too personally painful for publication when first written. Included are two essays on
Say You're One of Them
Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan also happens to be a Jesuit priest with an MFA from the University of Michigan. His stories have won prizes and been published in The New Yorker. His first book and story collection are a clear and focused portrayal of the gauntlet of deprivation and depredations
The Finder
I have been a devotee of former Harper’s editor Colin Harrison’s (The Havana Room) writing from his first novel (of six), and he rarely disappoints. His grasp of the modern world’s infrastructure—high finance, information technology, various forensics—as well as a microscopic understanding of urban life
The Book of Chameleons
Portuguese novelist JoséEduardo Agualuso is introduced to English-speaking Americans with this crime story set in Angola, where Felix Ventura trades in manufacturing pasts for customers requiring a nobler lineage. The odd ensemble of characters and the volatile setting provide a well-rounded story with surprising resonance.
Factory of Tears
If you can point to the globe and find Belarus, more power to you. Poet Valzhyna Mort is a Belarusian cultural nationalist, well-regarded and -awarded in Europe. She now lives in the U.S. and this bilingual edition is her first tome published in this country. The New Yorker noted:
The House on Fortune Street
Amazingly, I am always catching the impressive Margot Livesey’s (Banishing Verona) novels on the run. Or as excerpts in The New Yorker. Or something like that. I mention this by way of pointing out the powerful magnetic pull of Livesey’s prose. Her new opus is no different—immediately
Senselessness
Honduran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya (El asco, La diabla en el espejo), author of eight novels, five collections of short fiction, and one book of essays, and currently a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote this story (first published in Spanish in 2004) of an alcoholic writer hired to
Worshipping Walt
Considering the novelty and power of Walt Whitman’s liberating appeal to a broad swath of society, it is not surprising that he awakened and engendered strong devotion from a plethora of followers and devotees. This book traces the activities of some of his most avid associates: Anne Gilchrist, John
Dreaming Up America
Author and filmmaker Russell Banks (The Reserve, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction), who has 16 well-crafted novels under his belt, ventures into nonfiction with this meditation on the origins of America. Banks has never been reticent about his progressive leanings and gives them full license in this offhanded critique of American
Gore VIdal Interview
I have found Gore Vidal variously incisive, opaque, riveting, infuriating, brilliant, prescient, amusing, and just plain entertaining. Thus, this interview was so very satisfying (as well as edifying).
More Than It Hurts You
New York University professor Darin Strauss’s (The Real McCoy) new novel sets aside his past interest in limning American history for a story set in contemporary America, more specifically Long Island. Josh Goldin, a media salesman, is embroiled in a battle to keep his infant son as local authorities
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
David Wroblewski’s debut novel opens with mute Edgar Sawtelle living with his family in remote northern Wisconsin. The idyll is upset by Edgar’s father’s death and young Edgar’s suspicion that his uncle had a hand in his father’s death. Trying but failing to prove his
The Lost Dog
Novelist Michelle de Kretser (The Hamilton Case), who lives in Australia, focuses her third novel (which won both the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and Book of the Year in her home country) on Indian-Australian professor Tom Loxley, who is completing a book on Henry James but is preoccupied with
The Political Mind
George Lakoff, who is involved in something called cognitive linguistics purports to explain the science behind our political decision-making and, more to the point for Lakoff, how to put that science in the service of progressive political forces.
The Colfax Massacre
When I was in public school, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Rosewood, 20th-century lynchings, American concentration camps, and numerous other dark and ugly episodes in American history were ignored or glossed over. Upon more serious study, this disconcerting series of revelations casts a long and heavy shadow over the concept of
The Battle of the Labyrinth
My 10-year-old son Cuba has read all three prior Percy Jackson novels (The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters, The Titan’s Curse) and attests to the entertainment quotient of the fourth book. Rick Riordan, whose talents lie in recasting classic myths for this new millennium, leaves his young readers
The Enchantress of Florence
With the exception of The Jaguar Smile, a slim monograph from the ‘80s about a trip to war-torn Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie’s literary gifts have never quite appealed to me. I am pleased to report his newest opus is a grand story with the bonus of including Rushdie’s astute
Steer Toward Rock
Fae Myanne Ng, who was last heard from in 1994 with her novel Bone—short stories in smart magazines like Harper’s excepted—sets her new story in ‘60s San Francisco, offering up a story of Chinese life in America that juxtaposes old and new China. In her tale, butcher
Standing Up to the Madness
If ever a paean to grassroots activism were needed, this would seem to be a time. As Bill Moyers expresses: Amy Goodman doesn’t practice trickle-down journalism. She goes where the silence is, she breaks the sound barrier… She believes the media should be a sanctuary for dissent, the Underground
The Last Lecture
One of America’s lesser-attended afflictions is an appetite for advice and counsel from anyone adopting the mien and attitude of expertise. Which of course makes for a steady stream of flimflam artists. In the book world this is translated into the self-help genre, of which there is an endless
Our Secret Discipline
Modern poetic titan William Butler Yeats no doubt deserves scholarly analysis and exegesis; based on Helen Vendler’s stature and reputation at Harvard, her study of Yeats’s techniques and formal flourishes will no doubt continue to attract accolades and hurrahs. Most of the praise centers on her allowing readers
Renewing America's Food Traditions
In case it has escaped you, there are foodstuffs that are endangered by the toxicity of post-industrialism. In any case, among other contributions of this book are a list of more than 1,000 such perishables, and successes of “eater-based” conservation constituencies in “food recovery, habitat restoration, and market revitalization”
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
Walter Benjamin’s most famous essay is anthologized here (version two of four) along with 40 or so other ruminations on media, some well known, others obscure, and some presented in English for the first time. Benjamin was a true original and his hallmark essay deserves to be recapitulated for
The Age of Reagan
Sean Wilentz, who has among other things weighed in on the Bush presidency’s place in history, offers up a clear-headed historian’s assessment—or should I say reassessment—of Ronald Reagan’s place and influence. Along with Richard Reeves, Wilentz expands the universe of historiography that evaluates Reagan beyond
The Power of the Zoot
Odd attire exhibited by youth—tattoos, piercings, and buttock-cleavage trousers—are nothing new. Think tie-dye, sandals, and Native American jewelry, or jeans, T-shirts, and leather jackets with pointy shoes. What is new is attention to minority American cultures; in this case, Luis Alvarez diligently charts a culture’s exemplar, the
Strange Bedfellows
It is about time a serious scholar, in this case University of Iowa American Studies mentor and former nightclub comic Russell Peterson, examines this rise in attention and credibility attributed to The Daily Show, The Late Show With David Letterman, and such. It is no news (yet still fascinating) that
Havanas in Camelot
Here is a posthumous collection of 14 of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron’s (Sophie’s Choice, The Confessions of Nat Turner) essays: The title piece treats his relationship with John F. Kennedy; pieces on Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern, and yes, some personal meditations are also included.
Everything Is Cinema
I dimly remember seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend on a twin bill with a Laurel and Hardy short—I think Nixon was president—and I suspect there was a kind of a shift in how I saw things; looking back, watching films was never quite the same. Godard was a
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures
Much-heralded artist Jessica Abel and husband Matt Madden assemble a 15-lesson curriculum for creating comics (or if you will, graphic novels). She is a busy bee, also releasing two other books (Life Sucks and La Perdida). That’s it for my words; have a peek at the pictures.
The Dawn Patrol
I suspect that Don Winslow will never write a book that grabbed me as much as his epic thriller The Power of the Dog, but that won’t stop me from reading his stuff with hope in my heart. His newest tome (not to be confused with the 1941 Howard
What Amy Bloom's Been Reading
Amy Bloom responds to my query about her current reading: Jane EyreThe Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon Robert McCrum, who has spent 10 years at the literary helm of Britain’s Observer and before that, as editor at Faber and Faber, steps down and offers a thoughtful view of the
Book Digest: May 19, 2008
Darin Strauss, whose third opus, More Than It Hurts You, will enter the literary fray soon, weighs in on his latest reading: The Journals of John Cheever In case you missed my notice of Alberto Manguel’sThe Library at Night,The New York Times published Manguel on the same topic.
Book Digest: May 12, 2008
Elizabeth Strout, whose latest opus, Olive Kitteridge, is garnering well-deserved reviews, writes: The Power and the GloryThe Power and the GloryThe Ministry of Special CasesWarm SpringsPeace The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces From an Active Life McKibben, whose The End of Nature is incanted with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as
Book Digest: May 5, 2008
Sigrid Nunez, whose novels I have enjoyed and admired, responds to my inquiry about what she’s been reading lately: “I’ve been asked to teach a literature seminar in the Graduate Writing Program at the New School this fall. Thinking about ideas for a course, I remembered reading an
Book Digest: April 28, 2008
Joan Frank, whose first novel Miss Kansas CityI reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle, responded to my query about what she is reading: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two SaintsNew YorkersStonerOlive KitteridgeRecent HistoryTime and MaterialsFidelity Hispaniola: A Photographic Journey Through Island Biodiversity by Eladio Fernández As you may know, “Hispaniola” is the
Book Digest: April 21, 2008
Having had reason to contemplate philosopher/titan Ludwig Wittgenstein, (see below) I thought I would lay out a few hors d’oeuvres of his thinking. From his so-called early phase: * The world is everything that is the case. * What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
Book Digest: April 14, 2008
Susanna Moore (In the Cut and Big Girls) shares her current reading with you and me: Blood MeridianMr. ApologyStop TimeA Stopover in Venice Read on. The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases From a State Hospital Attic by Darby Pensey and Peter Statsny; photographs by Lisa Rinzler By now it is
Book Digest: April 7, 2008
As a literary journalist, I hang on to the notion that the universe of literature encompasses more than words and stories—think of the business of publishing, the cranks and attenuated characters and other odd life forms that populate it—and contains less of the refuse of life. Or at
Book Digest: March 31, 2008
From the pen of Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck: A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a
Book Digest: March 24, 2008
It is not yet clear to me whether Nicholson Baker’s amazing and brave new book, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, will have a normal cycle of attention or if his treatment of the various belligerents’ bombing of enemy cities and exposé of
Book Digest: March 17, 2008
Ex-Chicagoan, Syracuse University mentor, dog lover, and spirited writer George Saunders responds to our query regarding the state of his reading: Dead Souls Having participated in a web-based roundtable discussion on Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (soon to be posted) and having seen a trio of reviews, the most ludicrous
Book Digest: March 10, 2008
As has been my practice these last few weeks I have asked a writer I know—in this instance George Pelecanos—for some words about his reading: NorthlinePat Garrett and Billy the KidStonerBlood on the ForgeReturning to EarthLudlowCold in JulyValdez Is Coming Also, is it possible that I am the
Book Digest: March 3, 2008
Regular readers of this space will notice the continuation of my recent genius brainstorm of asking writers of my acquaintance to offer a tidbit about their current reading. Nicholson Baker—whose amazing new opus, Human Smoke, was noted in this very same space—is this week’s contributor. (Being a
Book Digest: February 25, 2008
Last week I introduced my new headline-grabbing, star-fucking, gambit—which entails begging various writers of my acquaintance to offer some literary tidbit that I may incorporate into this space. This week, Chip Kidd: The Eighth Day Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis by George Makari Better to have used
Book Digest: February 18, 2008
Recently I sent a note to Richard Russo: The Morning News Of course, all my literary acquaintances are not famous and award-winning authors. No doubt some are occupying musty garrets on obscure Midwestern campuses and perhaps would revel (maybe that’s too strong a sentiment) in the thought that someone
Book Digest: February 11, 2008
The proliferation of journals unfortunately referred to as “blogs” has naturally led to a burgeoning bibliography dedicated to pointing out the coincidence of the decline of civilization and the rise of weblogs. Sara Boxer, who wrote Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web about which she confesses, “Two years ago,
Book Digest: February 4, 2008
James Wood, Harvard mentor, literary critic (late of The New Republic, now of The New Yorker), and once and future novelist (The Book of God), has a new book, How Fiction Works, coming out this spring. In a 2006 article he stated: “The realist writer, that free servant of life,
Book Digest: January 28, 2008
Marshall McCluhan said: “When the globe becomes a single electronic web with all its languages and culture recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant, however precious.” Can someone explain to me what “the fixed point of view of print culture” is?
Book Digest: January 21, 2008
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
Book Digest: January 14, 2008
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 hopeful
Book Digest: January 7, 2008
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 excellent
Book Digest: December 17, 2007
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
Book Digest: December 10, 2007
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 it
Book Digest: December 3, 2007
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 creative logjam. If you have ideas
Book Digest: November 26, 2007
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
Book Digest: November 19, 2007
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 new
Book Digest: November 12, 2007
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
Book Digest: November 5, 2007
Last week I made reference to Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska—and once pointed out that her small volume Nonrequired Reading is my inspiration for this column. In that book, she notes the disparity between what was reviewed in many literary journals and what was happening in bookstores: “Most, if not
Book Digest: October 29, 2007
From Wislawa Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel Lecture: The world—whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we
Nonfiction Books
You've stocked up on bookmarks, ordered the bookplates, and now you're ready to fill the shelves. Next time you're shopping, pass over the fiction and pick up something with an index. The writers offer a selection.
Book Digest: October 22, 2007
From Red Rover by Deidre McNamer: The Paris Review Interviews, Part II edited by Philip Gourevitch Apparently, wiser or at least more modest heads have prevailed at the Paris Review and the hyperbolic claim of their interviews being the “DNA of literature” seems to have been dropped. This second volume
Book Digest: October 15, 2007
The silly season has begun—awards nominations being announced and no doubt the attendant contretemps to follow. I’ll refrain from my usual jaundiced opinionating except to relay the good news that Jim Shepard has been nominated for a National Book Award for fiction. He is a writer for whom
Book Digest: October 8, 2007
I have never thought myself better or smarter because of my love of reading—though I do tend to think that about others who read. But I am beginning to wonder what cultural litmus test we may need to gauge the intellectual acuity of our civilization. Watching the baseball postseason
Book Digest: October 1, 2007
I was completing David Plante’s riveting novel, ABC, in which the protagonist has what I would call a transcendental episode with a 1923 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, when I received a copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Which got me to thinking about the universe unto themselves
Book Digest: September 24, 2007
From David Plante’s new novel, ABC: It seemed to Gerard that the trance he was in raised him above himself, so that he saw himself as if from a higher level, leaning closer and closer to read the book as the room became dim; saw himself and saw the
Book Digest: September 17, 2007
Last week I made mention of the appearance of George Saunders on the Late Show With David Letterman and cited an account of that unlikely happenstance by one of Saunders’s former students, Jeff Parker. Well, George’s editor at Riverhead, Sean McDonald, was kind enough to send us the
Book Digest: September 10, 2007
Among other things I can’t explain is the aptness of the well-worn line from A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Lots of good books to read, and yet there is something foreboding about the American political landscape—I
Book Digest: August 27, 2007
&Consider the journalistic artifice where writers presume to know the habits and activities of their readers: “While you are stuck in a 22-mile backup on your way to—and back from—your Labor day weekend at Wellfleet, Tahoe, or Myrtle Beach, pop in one of the eight compact discs
Book Digest: August 20, 2007
As if there are not enough reasons to read The New Yorker, last week it was reported that James Wood (he of the “hysterical realism” coinage) was joining its staff. All well and good, but I was puzzled by an odd statement that was attributed to The New Republic editor
Book Digest: August 13, 2007
I had it in mind to vituperate on some irksome aspect of American book culture but then I realized that time spent venting my spleen on well-trod terrain would be time taken from my great pleasure in reading Richard Russo’s latest opus, Bridge of Sighs—a pleasure that is
Book Digest: August 6, 2007
In his novel Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee has his protagonist give a speech when she accepts an award for her literary achievement—Coetzee’s acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy for his Nobel Prize was a wonderfully digressive incantation based on Robinson Crusoe—in which she says: Despite this
Book Digest: July 30, 2007
The coming months are filled with promise of great literary pleasure: books on the horizon include those by some of my favorite writers—Andrea Barrett, Percival Everett, Richard Russo, Joseph O’Connor, Ana Castillo, Ha Jin, and Graham Swift. And on a very sad personal note, I learned the other
Book Digest: July 23, 2007
A note to the feral fans of J.K. Rowling: Seeing them live in a seemingly endless video loop, and knowing there are apparently huge piles of lucre at stake in her latest revenue center make it hard for me to look upon that hoopla as a benign event. The
Book Digest: July 16, 2007
July happens to be the anniversary month of four revolutions—the American, the French, the Cuban, and the Nicaraguan. Maybe there is a theory that explains this; more likely it’s an accident of the calendar. What does not seem accidental is that we seem to appreciate revolutions from a
Book Digest: July 9, 2007
Here’s some inside baseball on big-time journalism’s favorite default mechanism to fill space or air in the event of a slow news day or a lack of imagination: a list. In this present case, I can plead that, given the high volume of books noted in the Book
Book Digest: July 2, 2007
From a Paris Review interview published in 1977, here’s Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. on patriotism: Interviewer: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Interviewer: Vonnegut: Interviewer: Vonnegut: Far more recently, I noted Rebecca Steffoff’s A Young People’s History of the United States; last week, know-it-all New York Times reviewer Walter Kirn bludgeoned
Book Digest: June 25, 2007
The New York Times Book Review—my favorite literary whipping boy—is much in my mind right now as 1) Dan Simon, publisher of the skewered-by-universal-scold Walter Kirn, The People’s History for Young Adults, ripostes with a letter to the editor; and 2) Thomas McGuane anointed Out Stealing Horses
Book Digest: June 18, 2007
May I say that I am bored—of course, I may!—with literary reviewers, some intelligent and useful (Adam Kirsch), some Paleolithic (Richard Schickel), offering undisguised special pleading as to why their self-appointed, self-selecting, self-serving guild members are superior to the barbarous rabble they identify as literary bloggers. In the
Book Digest: June 11, 2007
Southern lit-fictionist Larry Brown’s The Miracle of Catfish: A Novel in Progress, which came out a few weeks ago, is only the latest of a recent spate of unfinished manuscripts making it into print after the author’s death. Every writer leaves a paper trail at death; many name
Book Digest: June 4, 2007
Recently, the world of literary fiction was preoccupied with the diminishment of review space in American newspapers, with various (self-) interested parties weighing in. The New York Times stepped into this imbroglio and suggested that all was not lost—some bravehearted and industrious souls, known collectively as literary bloggers, might
Book Digest: May 21, 2007
My buddy Howard and I were involved in a somewhat heated dispute over recent remarks in this space suggesting the pantheon of iconic American painters was in his words, “small enough to fit on the head of a pin.” I had mentioned Grant Wood (and demurred on Disney and Warhol)
Book Digest: May 14, 2007
Last week I noted Christopher Hitchens’s new book, God Is Not Great, and my own disinterest in the book’s subject, but certainly not its author. This week Michael Kinsley discusses the book and fully one-half of that essay is about Hitchens—which makes it a valuable (and entertaining)
Book Digest: May 7, 2007
The recent brouhaha regarding the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s decision to downsize by eliminating the book editor’s position (currently held by the well-regarded Teresa Weaver) is a curious thing. It did send a ripple of indignation through the book reviewer and author community, and occasioned some mainstream (as opposed to
Book Digest: April 30, 2007
For a person who writes short stories, I have a funny way of reading them. I probably look more like a person scrutinizing a passing stranger on the street than someone settling down to read: skeptical, certainly frowning. Before the end of the first paragraph, I’ve already started flipping
Book Digest: April 23, 2007
I should warn you that of all the events of the past month (besides the commencement of the 2007 Major League Baseball season) Kurt Vonnegut’s passing sticks with me most—well, not so much his passing, but his living. So here I will treat you to a brief, though
Book Digest: April 16, 2007
The chattering and clattering classes are preparing for PEN’s World Voices fest coming soon to Manhattan. Me, I was in Cambridge, Mass., stumbling around the Bryn Mawr Bookstore, and found two gems by Moroccan author (and 2004 IMPAC prize winner) Tahar ben Jelloun: The Sand Child and With Downcast
Book Digest: April 9, 2007
I know I belabor expressing my animus to many literary and artistic awards. I must therefore point out those I find useful, such as the IMPAC/Dublin Award (an international award drawn from the recommendations of librarians), which recently announced its 2007 short list. This prize also has the distinction
Book Digest: April 2, 2007
This is not quite the silly season—happily, I’m not referring to the start of Major League Baseball—but rather to the fact that most of the beauty pageants known as awards have already had their day and their press releases. But, along comes Granta97 (Spring 2007), with an
Book Digest: March 26, 2007
It has not escaped my attention that some of my literary comrades have mellowed their negative attitudes toward the New York Times Book Review. I wonder if I will ever be able to say the same. I go through phases of paying attention to book reviews, and this is a
Book Digest: March 19, 2007
Two of my favorite events take place, in quick succession, in March: the twice (or thrice)-yearly Bryn Mawr Bookstore half-price sale, which, incredibly, discounts some titles more and more as the week-long sale progresses; and the PEN/Hemingway Awards, which in recent years has had Russell Banks, Richard Russo,
Book Digest: March 12, 2007
I’m no fan of the beauty contests that are known as awards, even the literary variety; nonetheless, I accept that they normally improve the lot of the awardee/awarded. Thus I am pleased to note that Daniel Mendelsohn has received a National Book Critics Circle nod for his wonderfully
Book Digest: February 26, 2007
In order to reify my credentials as a bona fide journalist I feel that I must occasionally create some list or other and also exhibit some sense of timeliness and topicality—these being the only paths open to me as I have foresworn having lunch with anyone but close friends.
Book Digest: February 12, 2007
Cultural moments that seem to have gained weight and currency in recent years strike me as just so much noise and special effects—which does not augur well for the literary narrative, if you look at the hoopla and attendant regurgitation of the advertisements on the modern version of Bread
Book Digest: February 5, 2007
Last week was busy and productive wherein, prefatory to scheduled conversations with the authors, I read Naked Sleeper by Sigrid Nuñez, House of Meetings by Martin Amis, and Zoli by Colum McCann—all excellent—and then, of course, carried out the conversations which should see the light of day, um,
Book Digest: January 29, 2007
Who doesn’t want to be an observer? Who wouldn’t like to notice something others overlook? For a few days I’ve been trying to come up with a single bad trait associated with being an observer, but like dolphins and rainbows, observers just seem wholly good. Which is
Book Digest: January 22, 2007
This past holiday I bought my son—whose favorite song is Warren Zevon’s “Gorilla, You’re a Desperado”—a 1GB iPod Shuffle. Its approximately 240 songs should be sufficient for his nine-year-old musical literacy. This started me contemplating the notion of collection and storage—for the record, I have
Book Digest: January 8, 2007
One consequence of living in a largely book-demarcated reality is a useful disregard for conventions such as the reflexive (and may I suggest lemming-like) homage paid to the calendar year. Since I don’t celebrate most commercial holidays (except to give my young son, Cuba, gifts), nor do I find
Book Digest: December 18, 2006
Let me just say that I am not a fan of lists and their masquerading as service journalism—though many 21st-century post-industrial homo ludens rely on lists to navigate the shit-streams of information that threaten to capsize our tiny strange boats—which is not the same thing as being force-fed
Book Digest: December 11, 2006
If you are a book store habitué or are shopping for people who like books, you have noticed that booksellers are loaded up with books that used to be called “coffee-table books.” (Whatever is a coffee table?) My sharp-eyed editor noticed this week’s rendition of Book Digest had unconsciously
Book Digest: December 4, 2006
Last month I was in New York for a week and among the many small humiliations I endured—my husband and I were auditioning our family for preschool—was this one: I had to ask a clerk in a very famous children’s bookstore if they carried any of the
Book Digest: November 27, 2006
By Christmas Eve, I never feel like I’ve bought enough. The arms race catches up with me, it tugs at my anxiety and my wallet. At some point on the 24th I end up at a stripmall bookstore in Connecticut or North Carolina wondering what I can walk out
Book Digest: November 20, 2006
The issue of how we come to choose the books (and music, art, movies, television, etc.) we attend to is one that I wrestle with continuously, in large part based on my suspicions of and unease with the literary (critical) press. Ideally, one could sample everything of interest before settling
Book Digest: November 13, 2006
In Richard Powers’s excellent newest novel, The Echo Maker, a brain scientist contemplates the bad reviews attendant to his freshly published book—a novel experience for him. And he concludes that, for those involved in the review business, there is no gain to positively reviewing books by well-established writers.
Book Digest: November 6, 2006
You should know that Nonrequired Reading, Wislawa Szymborska’s small volume of prose pieces published a few years ago, altered my notion of book notices: Nonrequired Reading For Nonrequired Reading, Szymborska collected about a hundred of these sketches—one of my favorites is The Button in Literature by Zbignew Kostrzewa.
Book Digest: October 30, 2006
I’ve been thinking a lot about beginnings. Partly this is because it is fall and as the child of an academic, autumn is the year’s first season for me, a much more persuasive time for starting over than bleak midwinter, no matter how much Champagne is involved. Partly,
Book Digest: October 23, 2006
You are forewarned: This is about me. In a rare paroxysm of self-consciousness I recently spent some time going over (in my head, mind you) my contributions to American literary journalism—specifically this weekly rendition of recently or about-to-be published books. While I stand proud, if not tall, regarding my
Book Digest: October 16, 2006
Perhaps there is some truth to the old saw that literary squabbles are so vicious and virulent because they are for such small stakes. Assuming that the dispute around Myra MacPherson’s welcome biography of renegade journalist I.F. Stone, All Governments Lie, is at least in part literary, we
Book Digest: October 9, 2006
There was a point at which I experienced great vexation that the steady drumbeat of eyewitness reportage contained by the books of Jon Lee Anderson, George Packer, Thomas Ricks, and Seymour Hersh seemed to have little or no effect on the body politic. Along comes Bob “Which Way is the
Book Digest: October 2, 2006
You don’t need me to make you aware of such new books as those by Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, or Margaret Atwood—the literary press (such as it is) and even the barbarians manning the decks of mass media seem to find the press releases apprising them of these
Book Digest: September 25, 2006
Based on the drumbeat of enthusiastic notices it seems that the book of the moment is critic/scholar Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost. Good news indeed (I will have something to add to the choir in due time), as this is a wonderful non-Holocaust, Holocaust book (read the reviews to
Book Digest: September 18, 2006
President Bush’s press conference of Sept. 15 should be noted as a landmark of sorts, as he continued to use the presidential bully pulpit to elevate public discourse and educate the American people in what appears to be the New Logic: Question: Bush: Interesting slight of hand, no? To
Book Digest: September 11, 2006
Publishers Weekly and The New York Times must have been too busy to note that Dandy Dan Wickett, founder of the Emerging Writers Network and the hardest working man in the book world (leading some observers to think there is more than one DD) and Steve Gillis, author and founder
Book Digest: September 4, 2006
Journalism being what it is—it seems driven by lists and so-called service features and other banalities—there have been occasions when I have been tempted to stoop to such, and on this day I can no longer resist. I hope against all hope that this assemblage makes some (more)
Book Digest: August 21, 2006
No tawdry headlines, scandals, feuds, vicious reviews, or dumb awards—what a pleasant week! I took pause to contemplate the late Susan Sontag’s view that, “To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of
Book Digest: August 14, 2006
I didn’t previously have a particular picture of a perfect or at least prototypical New England day—yesterday in Peterborough, N.H., at the MacDowell Colony will ever onward be that picture. Bright sun, but not too—colors vivid and true. Breezy, almost cloudless sky, and a congenial gathering—
Book Digest: August 7, 2006
A South African journalist—I wish I could recall his name—once poignantly quipped “a patriot is someone who saves his country from its government.” Looking around the world (actually one need not exercise much agency, as the bad, bad news wafts through the seemingly impermeable iPod-istic barriers we construct)
Book Digest: July 17, 2006
It looked as if this was a week when none of the folks I have identified as Enemies of Literature were wreaking havoc such as creating the Best Book about Whatever in the past 25 years lists or identifying “scummy little books” or beating up on Frenchmen. I was wrong.
Book Digest: July 10, 2006
The fetishism for full disclosure is variously amusing and vexing, especially when it comes from this, the journalistic quadrant. Of course, it’s a practice that I engage in, albeit subtly, as when for instance I announce (as I do frequently) that I am partial to books on Cuba, New
Book Digest: June 26, 2006
Watching the United States Millionaire’s Club latest so-called debate about the American military adventure in Iraq inevitably lead me back to Karl Kraus, who observed in April of 1917: “War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too
Book Digest: June 19, 2006
As a fairly private citizen I should be pleased that this week has gone by without a particularly egregious depredation occurring in the literary world—but as a journalist I am, of course, without anything to jaw about, nothing about which to form nimble sentences of despair and outrage—no
Book Digest: June 12, 2006
The faux short-fingered vulgarians (a little inside joke) at Coudal Partners have come up with a swell idea, not the least of which because they have shown dubious judgement in including me—they asked an assortment of writers/readers to recount (in a few hundred words) a reading experience in
Book Digest: June 5, 2006
With regularity there is much caterwauling and ululating directed to the depredations and idiocies that emanate from the newspaper book review that people love to hate (guess who?)—this is engaging and amusing only to a point—one that in my estimation has long passed. Recently, it has occurred to
Book Digest: May 29, 2006
Last week I noted that the recently concluded industrial gathering—the one that occasions much forgettable verbiage and disposable text—has in part the task of previewing the next season’s book industry’s offerings. Having spared myself the company of strangers and being subjected to other predations, I believe
Book Digest: May 22, 2006
This past week, book-business types and then some gathered in Washington, D.C., to do commerce and rub shoulders at the big annual industry gathering known as BookExpo America. I hope some good comes of this melee—many of the then-some types are filing web reports, which I have not,
Book Digest: May 15, 2006
A Bee Stung, So I Killed All the Fish (Notes From the Homeland 2003-2006) by George Saunders The seven tidbits in this limited-edition booklet (cover art by Sean McDonald) are vintage George Saunders of the reigning (ironic?) aesthetic that has culminated in his latest collection, In Persuasion Nation, which as
Book Digest: May 2, 2006
As someone who reads a fair amount and is surrounded by books and never travels without a few books, and whose inner monologue is frequently preoccupied with things literary, I must confess to a certain amount of navel-gazing about this activity that has become the engine of my life. Thus,
Book Digest: April 20, 2006
It doesn’t take omniscience or prescience to know that as you read, this editors at relevant media (a category opening room for much debate) around the nation are preparing their list for the dubious seasonal thing known as Summer or Beach Reading. I know this because I have (for
Book Digest: April 11, 2006
I don’t get out much but I make occasional forays to events that include rooms full of strangers, and so I recently attended the latest version of the yearly PEN Hemingway awards at the JFK Library at which Joyce Carol Oates was the keynote speaker. Her talk, a loose
Book Digest: March 30, 2006
&My editors here regularly hector to me about my inclination for citation—as opposed to the expression of my own thoughts. Now I must say, I love my editors. [Hey, thanks. —eds] And no doubt my humility (I often feel what I have cited is far better than anything
Book Digest: March 20, 2006
Elsewhere on this site you will soon find a recently rediscovered, never before published conversation with Alberto Manguel, author of The History of Reading, and more recently A Reading Diary. Growing up in Buenos Aires, he came to know one of modern history’s most renowned librarians, Jorge Luis Borges.
Book Digest: March 9, 2006
Perhaps you are thinking, Who is this guy and why should I listen to him about books? (That is, for those who are not thinking, Who cares? or He’s cool; he went to high school with my second cousin.) A perfectly legitimate question, which if we are going to
Book Digest: February 28, 2006
Here are some things axiomatic for me in my take on talking about books: 1) There are far too many books and writers deserving of the meager attention doled our by America’s mainstream literary press; 2) I am not at all constrained by whatever Byzantine code or principles book
Lone Star Statements
The praise of professional critics hardly matters to the book-reviewing readers at Amazon.com. A compilation of the best of the worst... about the best.