If you only know the (great) movie version of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With The Wind, you might think Atlanta was burned in a day. But a city as big as Atlanta can’t be burned down that easily. It took General Sherman’s army nearly three months, from September 1864 … Read the rest
If you’re on the east coast of the USA these days, you might catch a painted bus called Furthur running up and down the seaboard. This colorful vehicle is named after the original Furthur that took novelist Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Ken Babbs and the rest of the Merry Pranksters … Read the rest
I used to go to BookExpo in New York City every Spring. It was a grand event, a joyous social swirl of writers and publishers and editors and bloggers and critics. But, regretfully, I stopped going to BookExpo a couple of years ago. Some friends tell me the event has … Read the rest
Furthur, Further … that literary device on wheels, that great American rolling metaphor.
Fifty years after novelist Ken Kesey gathered his friends into a painted bus and drove a jagged route from California to New York City, the novelist’s son Zane Kesey is hitting the road again, in a new … Read the rest
I’ve been trying to philosophize about the Ukranian crisis in real time. This is always hazardous. Last Saturday morning, February 22, I invited readers to look at six images representing the history of Ukraine and to suggest three more that help fill out the story we are trying to understand. … Read the rest
I hope my pick for the most significant book of 2013 will surprise you. It surprises me. For one thing, it’s not a book. It wasn’t published in 2013. And I’ve never mentioned it on Litkicks before.
Before I explain, here’s a quick wrap-up of my year of reading and … Read the rest
The fact that I don’t love Thomas Pynchon is statistically nearly impossible.
Any literary heat map of my favorite writers would find Pynchon near the center, hovering somewhere between Brautigan, Vonnegut, Kesey, Burroughs, Thompson, Acker, Coetzee, Auster. And yet I can’t stand his thick, impenetrably clever prose. I find his … Read the rest
(Dear readers: some of you may have been wondering why I have not blogged my thoughts about the stunning news that five new J. D. Salinger books will be posthumously published. The truth is, I’m dumbstruck. I never expected to read another book about the wonderful Glass family, … Read the rest
The happy chaos of a large family vacation to a historical battlefield town doesn’t leave much time for the kind of reflection I like to put into a Litkicks blog post.
It does, however, lend itself to some pretty good jokes. When I arrived at Gettysburg first in one car … Read the rest
