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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
