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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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).
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
