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
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
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
Ex-Chicagoan, Syracuse University mentor, dog lover, and spirited writer George Saunders responds to our query regarding the state of his reading: I am just emerging from our [MFA] admissions reading process at Syracuse, so I haven’t been reading besides that lately: I read half of our 300 (40-
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: The best novel I’ve read in a long while is Willy Vlautin’s Northline, which is to be published by Harper Perennial
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
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: I just finished Thornton Wilder’s epic novel The Eighth Day, and my jaw is
Richard Russo’s book picks; Unrecounted; My Unwritten Books; Torture and Democracy; The Learners; Gone to Ground; The Poem of a Life; Girl Meets Boy; The Forger; Artists in Exile; The Lodger Shakespeare; Nazi Literature in the Americas; The Point; Glimmer Train No. 66
Breaking the Mode; Frank Lloyd Wright; Island of My Hunger; I Was Cuba; Charlatan; The Best American Erotic Poems; Everything Lost; Robert Frost; Predictably Irrational; The Best of the Bellvue Literary Review; The Jewish Messiah; A People’s History of American Empire; Gang Leader for a Day
Salt River; The Seventh Well; In Search of the Blues; Into the Tunnel; My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead; Walt and Skeezix; The Mighty Wurlizter; Sympathy for the Devil; Rostoprovich; Weimar Germany; A Treatise on Civil Order; Her Last Death; The Soul Thief; Land Grant College Review
