newcritics

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In John Baker’s thought-provoking, elegant new novel, “Winged With Death,” the past leads the present in an unstoppable tango.
The past is 1970s-80s Montevideo, Uruguay, where the military dictatorship is burying people alive, and a milonguero, a master of the tango, dances in cellar salons. The present is present-day York, England, where the dancer [...]

At the age of 94 Studs Terkel finally sat down and wrote his memoir Touch and Go–a book so capacious in its varied carols and its assemblages of American curios that reading it is like falling down a flight of stairs while pasting rare stamps in an album. One is astonished by the worlds revealed [...]

Dickens was far from a religious writer.  He certainly wasn’t as preoccupied with his characters’ quarrels with God, as was his admirer and literary disciple, Dostoevsky.  It’s a sure bet that when a character in one of his novels starts in on religion, that character is a hypocrite.  A preoccupation with religion—and it’s always religion [...]

Two communities of readers are experiencing the end of an era this first quarter of 2009: the literary followers of Johns Updike and Cheever, and the tv fans of Michael Crichton’s ER. Each community was brought together in a shared passion in large cultural numbers in a way that we won’t see again. For ER, [...]

You’ll have to go out and buy a hard copy of this month’s Vanity Fair, because James Wolcott’s review of Blake Bailey’s new biography of John Cheever isn’t online, unfortunately.  But Maud Newton’s review for Barnes and Noble is.
Both are positive reviews but I don’t think I’ll be reading the book now.  I don’t [...]

The Lincoln bicentennial has captured the media’s attention with scores of books and documentaries recently released. Spurred on by the election of President Obama, we are being reacquainted with the man who, in the words of Henry Gates, “stands at the heart of what it means to be American.” In the wake of this renewed [...]

I have several friends who are physicians and scientists and lots of friends and acquaintences who are writers. Sometimes the two groups meet in my presence like two wandering tribes who have been traveling a long way across the steppes of Russia. You can always tell these tribesmen and tribeswomen apart because the scientists dress [...]

Jean Stafford was already gone from Robert Lowell’s life when Elizabeth Bishop entered into it and he entered into hers.  So Stafford makes fleeting appearances in his letters to Bishop.  When I started grad school Lowell and Stafford were my ideal of a bohemian romantic couple.  I had no good reason for this.  I hadn’t [...]

John Updike once got me laid. I was in my mid-20s, bored with joke writing, anxious to explore longer, serious forms. I split my time between the NYPL on 40th St., and The Strand down on 12th. I’d begun dressing all in black, the idea being that in order to be a real writer, I [...]

(Crossposted at my joint)

John Lennon: The Life
Philip Norman
2008, Ecco, ISBN 978-0-06-075401-3
With several very large biographies of John Lennon in existence (most notably Ray Coleman’s Lennon [1984] and Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon* [1988]) and countless rehashings of the Beatles’ collective career (perhaps the most informative being Barry Miles’ Paul McCartney: Many Years from [...]

Some people are going to be sadder to hear the news about Donald E. Westlake.  Other people are going to be sadder to hear about Richard Stark.
Westlake and Stark are both dead.  They died together, over the weekend, killed by heart attacks, while vacationing down in Mexico.
Course they died together.
They were the same guy.
Same guy, [...]

The action films of the 1970s shot in and around New York embrace a curb-level realism - an obsession with gritty locations - that no studio or backlot can possibly reproduce. The storefronts, dented cars, barren parks and filigreed subway els dress movies like The Seven-Ups, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, and the French [...]

The best book ever written about the scourge of drugs and the racial chasm in the deep interior of Brooklyn was Greg Donaldson’s gritty 1994 true life new journalism book, The Ville. It covered the lives of two men - one a Housing cop and the other a gang member - along with a vast [...]

I believe we must treat our political foes with respect in the arena of public opinion. And so I will dedicate this post to the Governor of Alaska. This is Banned Books Week, and it’s always appropriate to look at what drives literary censorship in this country. According to the American Library Association, more than [...]

For many years now, curmudgeon-blogger-painter-author James Howard Kunstler has been predicting the downfall of America’s vast consumer society in stark terms, in his non-fiction books (like his 2006 The Long Emergency) and on his iconic blog, Clusterfuck Nation. Read Kunstler for a couple of weeks, and he will piss you off. Read him for [...]

Little, Brown missed the mark in subtitling Joe Nick Patoski’s absorbing new biography of Willie Nelson ‘An Epic Life’.
Willie’s story is more of a tall tale. Like Daniel Boone, Willie belongs both to American history and American myth. Huckster. Trickster. Philanthropist. Pothead. Road dog. Genius. His nicknames read like godly epithets of a peculiarly American [...]