In case you were wondering, yes, I am still reading the classics. It’s my calling. And Mary Wollstonecraft’s polemic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was next on my list, so here we are. As with many of the writers on my list this time around, I first heard of Mary Wollstonecraft when I was a wee, bright-eyed English major, and, perhaps unfortunately, the main thing I think about whenever I see her name is a statement my professor made …

I’m not done complaining about hardcover book prices yet. Here are just a few books I can’t read right now, even though I’d like to, because I’m not fond of either inflated prices or bulky print formats:

Did you hear that the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah CD costs $28? But that’s only during the first year, after which the CD will be re-issued in a less expensive package for $15.95.

No, you didn’t hear that, because the music industry isn’t dumb enough to sabotage their profits by making audiences wait a year to buy new releases (that’s right, even the music industry isn’t that dumb). The book publishing industry, on the other hand, is that dumb.

I wrote last year …

Personally, I like the dead white males. Call it a guilty pleasure, but I can extract great enjoyment from a New York TImes Book Review featuring a cover piece on Thomas Hardy, an endpaper on Karl Shapiro and interior articles about Hart Crane and John Osborne. And I did enjoy this weekend’s issue very much, even if only one book by a living literary author is discussed.

That singleton is Chris Abani, and I think I’ll check out his The Virgin of Flames …

1. Newsweek’s book critic Malcolm Jones recently turned in a review of Vikram Chandra’s 928-page Sacred Games in which he frankly confessed to not finishing the book. Scott Esposito and Ed Champion don’t like this one bit, but I have to stand with Michael Orthofer, who finds the offense understandable.

I’ve always stood against the idea of literary criticism as a lofty or accredited profession. I like to think of critics and “regular readers” as similar animals in the …

Recently, I was perusing my bookshelves and noticed that among the novels and books of poetry, I have a lot of plays. This is undoubtedly because of the large part theater has been in my life, but even though there are few things that compare to the pleasure of live performance, I find that a well-written play can make for a truly wonderful reading experience. Looking over my collection, I decided to try to pick five favorites, which I did, with quite a …

A novelist named E. Howard Hunt died today. Of course, E. Howard Hunt won’t go down in history as a novelist, despite the fact that Amazon lists six (6!) pages of spy thrillers and non-fiction books he wrote. Howard Hunt, along with G. Gordon Liddy, planned and executed the break-in at the Watergate national democratic headquarters in 1972 that ended up bringing down the Nixon Presidency.

E. Howard Hunt, a dapper but dour CIA agent, lived an interesting life. …

Turner Classic Movies has come through again with the recent cable premiere of a fascinating movie I didn’t even know existed: a 1962 film treatment of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night starring Jason Robards as psychiatrist Dick Diver and Jennifer Jones as his tragic patient and wife Nicole Diver.

It’s a glamour production all the way, opening with a champagne splash of bad music as the camera sweeps across the sunny vistas of the French Riviera, where most of the action …

Twenty-four pages, New York Times Book Review? Three skinny issues in a row, what the hell? I think a certain Mr. Tanenhaus has been mistaking global warming for summer vacation, but we’ll forgive him today, because today’s slender issue turns out to be significantly better than the last two.

We begin in good form with a stunning Tyler Hicks photograph of Norman Mailer looking rarely introspective and solemn, which accompanies an energetic, powerful five-page review of Mailer’s The Castle in …

I like to write about politics and history, but I don’t think I’m very good at it yet. Maybe that’s why I do it on another blog, because I’m nowhere near as sure of myself on these topics as I am when writing about literature, and I wouldn’t want to ramble and stumble like that here. My latest foray is a four-part series on a pretty tough question: “what is genocide?”. The best entry point is here. I’m really …