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
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
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
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
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
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-
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
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’
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
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-
