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Trawling Gutenberg, an Introduction
The first time I stumbled upon the Gutenberg archive, in 1995 or so, using my ISP’s proprietary browser, on my brand new “486 computer” from the JC Penney catalog, I thought it would be awesome,...
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Trawling Gutenberg: A Hazard of New Fortunes
William Dean Howells Most of us are familiar with the great figures of 19th century American fiction: Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe. We know less about the context in which they wrote, and in which...
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NBA Finalists 2012: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
I’m trying to read all the National Book Awards finalists in the fiction category this year before the winner is announced (which doesn’t give me a lot of time, so I may not make it). I just finished...
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NBA Finalists 2012: ‘The Round House’ by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich was one of a small handful of contemporary writers whose careers were superhot when I was in creative writing school back in the mid-to-late-80s. The others were Raymond Carver, Toni...
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NBA Finalists 2012: A Hologram for the King
I only knew Dave Eggers’ work by reputation, so I was surprised by how clean and controlled this book — especially its prose — turned out to be. I had expected something mawkish and self-celebratory....
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Books: “Marvel Comics: the Untold Story” by Sean Howe
One of my friends complained to me about this book that it gave “short shrift to the really interesting years at Marvel” — which years were, by his lights, the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby years, essentially...
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Books: My Notes on “The Sisters Brothers” and My Notes on Everybody Else’s...
I enjoyed Patrick deWitt’s “The Sisters Brothers” quite a bit. It is fun to read in exactly the same way that “True Grit” (the Coen Bros. version) is fun to watch, or “Red Dead Redemption” is fun to...
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Book Review: “The Wife” by Meg Wolitzer
Amazon recommended “The Interestings” by Meg Wolitzer to me, but $12.99 is too much to pay for an e-book, by my lights, unless it’s by an author whose work I already know. I’d never heard of Wolitzer...
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