It’s hard for anybody to top Mickey Rourke’s interpretation of Charles Bukowski in Barfly, but a few actors are trying, and may even succeed.

For an eerie moment in this trailer, Matt Dillon is Bukowski. I like Matt Dillon, whose literary explorations have ranged from Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy to S. E. Hinton’s Outsiders. Factotum is a good Bukowski book about the young author’s attempts to hold down a day job. Imagine a depraved, typewriter-era Office Space — that may be …

Okay, I just can’t shake this off. It’s really bothering me.

Here are 50 writers who I think deserve the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant more than Jonathan Lethem:

1. Nicholson Baker
2. Rick Moody
3. Paul Auster
4. Ann Beattie
5. John Irving
6. Lorrie Moore
7. Don DeLillo
8. Kurt Vonnegut
9. Joyce Carol Oates
10. Dennis Cooper
11. Miguel Algarin
12. William Vollman
13. Lynne Sharon Schwartz
14. Chuck Pahlaniuk
15. Herschel Silverman
16. Edward Albee
17. Mary Gaitskill
18. Stephen Millhauser
19. Augusten Burroughs
20. Bob Holman
21. Gary Snyder
22. Caleb Carr
23. Vikram Seth
24. Jane Smiley
25. Tom Robbins
26. Louise Erdrich
27. …

Though some mysteries are considered literary (Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist), I like my mysteries well-written but with no emotional baggage. Escapist reading? Sign me up! When I want to read serious, I head for the non-fiction aisles. When I want to relax I head for the cozy mystery series featuring a gay vampire living in a small town in England. How can you resist? That said, these are a few of my recent favorites in the silent tough guys …

David Cronenberg’s new film A History of Violence is based on a 1997 graphical novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke. Two bad guys roll into a quiet Indiana town intending to indulge in murder and robbery and mayhem, but they’re disposed of by a mild-mannered family man whose only weapon is a glass coffee canister. He’s a hero, but this is only the beginning of the story. As his fame spreads, other strangers roll into town, and it turns …

Maybe I wasn’t in the mood for a Sunday New York Times Book Review today.

There were a few articles worth finishing, but I’m not sure any will turn out to be worth remembering. For instance, Walter Kirn’s summary of E. L. Doctorow’s promising civil-war novel “The March” spends interminable paragraphs working a snake metaphor (a snake is apparently what Sherman’s army was like as it marched through Georgia). The metaphor also inspires the issue’s cover art, but it doesn’t inspire me. …

Since morphing LitKicks into a blog format last year, I’ve made it my habit to check other litblogs as often as I can. A few are really good, and almost all of them are capable of saying something worthwhile every now and then. But most of the well-known litblogs strike me as limited in one major way: they seek relevancy by mainly covering new literature and current writers. I believe this to be a misguided pursuit.

Unless it is a litblogger’s goal to …

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, the British author of cultishly-popular humorous novels, short stories and plays (Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are probably his most famous fictional creations, and he worked on musicals with composers like George Gershwin and Jerome Kern) became unexpectedly controversial at the height of his popularity.

He was residing in France in 1940 when the Nazis over-ran the country. As a British citizen, he was interred as an enemy alien. The Nazis knew they had a prize catch, however, for Wodehouse was famous …

Renowned poet Sharon Olds has released to the public this letter, addressed to Laura Bush:

Laura Bush
First Lady
The White House

Dear Mrs. Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it’s a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people …

Oh, so he’s the one responsible for Cats.

Today, a collection of T.S. Eliot’s letters and a copy of The Waste Land sold in an auction for about $438,000. Say it with me, boys and girls: Damn, I really need to write more letters!

This got me to thinking about things like being a writer and correspondence. Though I doubt I’ll ever write anything that will turn me into college English class fodder like Eliot, I had to think it would be …

Rick Moody’s new Diviners looks good to me. I almost always like his eponymously moody books, which carry Raymond Carver’s emotionally charged minimalism into the age of MTV and CNN.

However, I can’t approve of a short essay in which he tells us he is tired of rock music. He unwittingly reveals the real problem when he cites Sonic Youth and Nels Cline as the kind of music he approves of. Forget that critically-acclaimed college-radio fancy stuff, which was never …