1. My god, will we ever stop talking about the 25 best books since Sam Tanenhaus lost his virginity? No, apparently we won’t. A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had never read the top title on the list, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and I pledged to read it and report my findings.
The results are in, and I have no choice but to say this straight out: Beloved is indeed something very special, and I can hardly argue with its position …
I was planning on writing a brilliant article tonight, and I figured I’d have plenty of time to write it after taking my daughter to the Mets game against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Well, the game started a half hour late due to an earlier rainstorm, and then just after the Mets took a 4-1 lead in the second inning I felt a drop of water on my arm, looked up and saw what looked like an ocean-size bucket of rain aiming for all …
Today’s edition of the New York Times Book Review is a repulsive pretender, titled “The Food Issue” and devoted entirely — yes, every single article — to books about food. I spent about twelve seconds with the issue before concluding that I have no interest in reading any of it.
Last week the Book Review graced us with an all-fiction issue — most of the articles were dull, but it was good to see so many new novels covered. Now I see that "concept …
Postmodern novelist Steve Aylett was born in 1967 in the Bromley Borough of London, England. His first book, The Crime Studio, was published in 1994, and his later works include Bigot Hall, Slaughtermatic and his most recent tour de force, Lint. Aylett’s work has been variously described as cyberpunk, slipstream, postmodern, bizarro, or, in the words of Grant Morrison: “The Matrix choreographed by Samuel Beckett for MTV.”
Steve Aylett’s new Lint is to literature what Spinal Tap is to heavy metal music: a brilliant send-up …
This is the last installment of my three-part study of William James, a philosopher I find uniquely compelling. William James was born in New York City in 1842, spent most of his adult life at Harvard University, and died in 1910 at his home in New Hampshire. He originally trained to be a medical doctor, and in this capacity he spent his early academic career absorbing the fascinating writings of new European “psychologists” like Ivan Pavlov and Sigmund Freud. He represented …
Despite the fact that my mother is recovering from shoulder surgery, I dragged her with me on Saturday to watch the Ron Howard-directed film version of the Dan Brown schlockfest/international phenomenon known as The Da Vinci Code. Now, I’ve not been shy about expressing my opinion of Brown’s novel (the short version being that I hated it a lot), so why would I go watch a movie based on it? Well, I was either expecting an afternoon of campy fun or I hate …
The New York Times Book Review has clearly aimed to make a big statement with its Top 25 Books of the Last 25 Years list, which it leaked to the blogs ten days ago in preparation for its publication today. Like many, I find this list highly disappointing (and so does Joyce Carol Oates). I don’t want to pound on a deceased ungulate mammal, so let me just say that if these were the best 25 books of the last 25 years I …
1. BookExpo America is the big story in the publishing community this week, and I’m really sorry I’m not there to attend the Litblog Co-op party or watch Ed Champion heckle Sam Tanenhaus. However, Jeff “Syntax” Bryant was visiting New York for the first time this week, and Jeff and I met up to have our very own little BookExpo, consisting of two guys, some good conversation, and lots of talk about baseball. So there. We even …
We usually review a large proportion of indie publications, poetry chapbooks and the like, but today we’re looking at three hardcover titles, all from large publishers. Here’s a diverse set of new books that might interest you:
Come Back by Claire and Mia Fontaine
This memoir by Claire and Mia Fontaine tells a familiar story — teenage bad attitude, growing pains, massive drug abuse, a painful recovery. What makes this book unique is the mother-daughter concept: Mia Fontaine is the book’s topic, but she …
Michel Houellebecq’s newest novel is about a future Earth ravaged by disasters and inhabited by two classes of humans: a small number of highly evolved and medically improved “neohumans”, and a starving race of devolving savages who subsist in the uncivilized territories outside the settled zones. We are with the neohumans, who have discovered a remarkable way to become immortal: their bodies are genetically duplicated at the end of each generation, and their original memory systems are continually ported from each aging body into …
