Here are four new books I’ve been spending time with:

Lately by Sara Pritchard

Sara Pritchard has got to be the most whimsical, least self-important postmodernist on the scene. Her new Lately is a slim, bright story collection with something like a black velvet Lassie painting on the cover. The characters in these stories are very witty and very self-aware, so much so that Pritchard manages to spin off one good story after another with barely a touch of plot, suspense or symbolism. …

1. So, apparently there’s this series of books about some wizard named Harry Potter? And the last book in the series is coming out this summer, or something? Well, the cover was revealed today: British version and U.S. version.

2. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the newest Oprah book. So if you were waiting until it had a giant O on the cover to pick up a copy, the time has come.

3. Recently at a celebration …

John Osborne, the subject a new biography by John Heilpern, has never been a household name on my side of the Atlantic Ocean. But they knew him well in England in the 1950’s, when he and Kingsley Amis (father of our Martin) and Harold Pinter and many others bandied around London as The Angry Young Men, a close match to the Beat Generation writers in America, as well as the cafe-haunting Existentialists of Paris. But the fad of the Angry …

Reviews of writers we know usually carry some suspense, some excitement, almost a salacious interest (as in: so, what crazy things are John Banville or William Vollmann or Jane Smiley up to today?). On the other hand, when we read reviews of new and unknown writers, the reading itself often feels like work. A book critic who’s writing about, say, Daniel Alarcon or Dinaw Mengestu or Treeza Azzopardi always has to work much harder to keep our interest, and it’s instructive to note …

1. Patti Smith’s new album Twelve contains nothing but cover versions, continuing a tradition that dates back to Rage, Guns N Roses and (the earliest example I can think of) Joan Jett. It’s odd to think of poet Patti releasing an album with no original lyrics, but she gives us a marvelously personal selection of songs in exchange, including Bob Dylan’s “Changing of the Guard”, Neil Young’s “Helpless” and Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble”. If you’re looking …

This week, I’m working frantically to get my application finished for this summer language program I want to get into, so I am incapable of thinking about anything other than this. As such, I thought I’d write about language. We all love language, right? Okay then.

Provided I get into this program, I’ll be spending my summer studying Arabic. This will be the third foreign language I’ve studied (the other two being Spanish and Italian), and I’m looking forward to it. …

I’ve recently become acquainted with n+1, an ambitious downtown New York magazine run by a pack of young intellectuals with advanced degrees from Columbia, Harvard and Yale. They write with passion and humor about serious subjects, and they stand defiantly against modern banality and techno-intellectual hype. They are clearly aware of the tradition of T. S. Eliot, who urged a similar return to traditional highbrow values in his Criterion, and these young bucks usually manage to live up to this legacy with their …

There are Shakespeare tragedies. And then there’s King Lear.

This mammoth tale of betrayal and human folly is running at the Public Theater in Greenwich Village, New York right now in a James Lapine production, and you better believe I ran out to get tickets the minute I heard Kevin Kline would be playing the lead. I love King Lear, though I’m not always sure why.

It’s a difficult play. Unlike Hamlet, which …

Once again, the New York Times Book Review is featuring a rave review for an unknown writer on its cover. This is a nice trend.

Joshua Ferris, a young up-and-comer who just completed an enjoyable blogging engagement at The Elegant Variation, has written a workplace novel, Then We Can To The End, in which most of the action takes place in a dysfunctional Chicago ad agency. I recently looked at this book and wondered if it could possibly be as funny …

I’ve liked Milan Kundera for awhile, but reading his novel Immortality sealed the deal for me. Now I am a full-blown fan, and think he’s a wonderfully brilliant writer — not just as a craftsman of prose, though that would be enough — but as a builder of novels that are stunningly well put together. Since I’m a Kundera groupie, I was glad to see an excerpt from his latest, The Curtain on The Guardian recently. There are many things …