I’ll never forget where I was and how I felt when I read the closing pages of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, the first and most crucial part of his New York Trilogy
City of Glass was … Read the rest
(We’ve been talking to novelist Roxana Robinson about her unique family history, which includes two celebrated 19th century Americans, Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this conclusion to the two-part interview, we talk about Harriet Beecher Stowe, about religion in fiction, and about Roxana’s own mission as a … Read the rest
It wasn’t long after I became enraptured by the uncommon fiction of Roxana Robinson that I learned she was a direct descendant of the famous, controversial 19th century preacher Henry Ward Beecher and a relative of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe. I was intrigued but somehow not surprised; … Read the rest
1922 was a special year for modernist literature. On February 2, James Joyce was the shy guest of honor at a small publication party for Ulysses in Paris. Sylvia Beach showed Joyce the book for the first time that day, thus establishing 2/2/22 as its Joycily pleasing official publication date.… Read the rest
(This blog post about my lifetime of Lou Reed concerts from 1979 to 2011 is the third of three parts. Here are part one and part two.)
It’s Sunday morning, exactly one week since Lou Reed died. I’ve been touched by many tributes since then, and as I publish … Read the rest
I’m trying real hard to find a way to love Traveling Sprinkler
I say “the new Paul Chowder novel” the way one might say … 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
Jack Kerouac’s poetry has just been enshrined in the prestigious Library of America
Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City
