The news that one of the last two free-standing newspaper book reviews will be edited by someone with no book-review experience to speak of—and not that much of a literary or journalistic resume either—has led to renewed handwringing about the state of book reviewing itself. Is the form a vital
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I’ve been rooting for Ben Fountain ever since Malcolm Gladwell profiled him in a 2008 New Yorker piece on late-blooming talent. That’s when I learned that Fountain was forty-eight when his first collection of short stories, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, appeared. Anyone who’s seriously
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Controversy attaches to Oscar nominations as reliably as it does to American actions in combating terrorism (which isn’t to equate the type or degree). Rarer is the case when it overlaps.
The absence of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow from the nominee list for best director has some
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Paul Elie has a cover essay in today’s New York Times Book Review in which he posits that contemporary fiction has lost its faith.
[I]f any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John
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Authors call their writing “work” for a reason, and there aren’t many who worked like Philip Roth—or took it as seriously. Use of the past tense is necessary now that he’s officially announced his retirement. Forget his output for the moment; anyone aware of his daily writing routine—
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Amazon is persisting with its Election Heat Map, which on November 5 showed Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama 59 percent to 41 percent based on the purchase of "red" books versus "blue" books (and which at last check has the post-election gap “narrowed” to 57-43).
D.G.
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Some months after the fact, The New York Review of Books is running an essay by Allan Gurganus to mark the occasion of John Cheever’s one hundredth birthday, which fell on May 27 of this year.
There’s not much that’s new in the piece, which is a mixed bag of anecdote and reflection.
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Hilary Mantel fans already know the news: The author of Wolf Hall and other novels has won the 2012 Man Booker Prize, for Bring up the Bodies (becoming only the third writer, and first woman, to win the award twice). But do they know she also wrote for Commonweal? See her piece from our Summer
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Among the pleasures of reading James Wood in the New Yorker are the mini-tutorials on fiction woven into his critiques. A case in point is his piece on Tom Wolfe’s new novel, featured in the current issue. It’s highly entertaining as a review (it really is), but the take-down also comes with
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Compliance is the second feature from director Craig Zobel, and when it was shown at Sundance earlier this year, audience members reportedly booed and walked out. The concession worker at the theater where I recently saw it told me she hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to watch it, and, while no one
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Hoo boy. Having inevitably wondered when I read Cloud Atlas how it could ever be made into a movie, I thought I might find a clue in the trailers available now online. From the original six-minute clip and its two-minute reboot, I think I have–and the prospects aren’t pretty.
Author David
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Richard Ford cites John Ruskin’s idea on composition as “the arrangement of unequal things” at the beginning and the end of his impressive novel Canada, and this notion is at work both thematically and functionally throughout. The opening pair of sentences—“First, I’ll tell about the
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Xan Cassavetes’ 2004 documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (available DVD-only from Netflix) chronicles the history of the Los Angeles-area pay-TV station that specialized in cinema and gave viewers an art-house experience without having to leave the couch. That these viewers included
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