This year’s model
Venture to the top floor of the three-story Borders store in midtown Manhattan, and chances are the first face you'll see will belong to Pete Yorn. Squinting out from the cover of his second album --...
View ArticleHow to bring an author back from the dead
Erica Heller tells a lovely story about her father Joseph's delight in the success of his first book, the novel "Catch-22." As she recalls in her new memoir, "Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller...
View ArticleDon’t just buy the record — help make it
Juliana Hatfield, a singer-songwriter whose acerbic single "My Sister" was a staple on modern-rock radio during the summer of 1993, was planning to quit the business not too long ago. Music, she...
View ArticleThe worst fiction about 9/11
As the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, there has been much discussion about the best novel about the attacks and their aftermath.Of course, there have been smart and sensitive novels...
View Article“Can we ever really know Ernest Hemingway?”
As Paul Hendrickson concedes early in his new book, "Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961," the world isn't in dire need of another Papa bio. "Ernest Hemingway," he...
View ArticleWhy Bob Dylan won’t win the Nobel Prize
According to the British bookies at Ladbrokes, Bob Dylan is suddenly a 5-1 choice to capture the Nobel Prize for literature when the Swedish Academy awards the annual honor Thursday in Stockholm.A...
View ArticleThe Republican war on science is un-American
In his new book, “The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America,” (Bellevue Literary Press), Jonathan D. Moreno delivers an impassioned defense of scientific study. “The alternative to...
View ArticleCan Harper Perennial reinvent publishing?
Just over two years ago, an Atlanta writer named Blake Butler submitted a story to Cal Morgan’s short fiction website, Fifty-Two Stories. Morgan, the editorial director of Harper Perennial, was so...
View ArticleHow do you say “balls of gold” in French?
Gavin Bowd, the English translator for Michel Houellebecq, was working on the controversial French novelist’s “The Map and the Territory” — Knopf will publish the first American edition in January —...
View ArticleWhy everyone hates the media
The cover of Jonathan M. Ladd’s new book shows a pair of newspaper vending boxes that have been vandalized. “Lies,” reads the graffiti scrawled across the machines.Lots of people seem to agree with the...
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