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
(I’ve been on a little vacation, but here are some links you might like. The image of an eye is by Susan Manvelyan, via BoingBoing.)
1. Here’s a really good piece by British novelist Tom McCarthy, one of the brighter literary lights of our time: Technology and the … Read the rest
A casual society of underground/alternative-minded writers calling themselves The Unbearables have been spreading joy and literary wisdom around downtown New York City for as long as I can remember. They protested the cravenness of the New Yorker magazine and the growing commercialism of the surviving Beat Generation writers during the … Read the rest
Here they are, the Literary Kicks Overrated Writers of 2006: Philip Roth, Joan Didion, William Vollmann, Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem.
What these writers all have in common is that I once cared about each one of them. You don’t get on my Worst Five list … Read the rest
Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are my final two selections for the five most overrated writers of 2006.
Some readers find Cormac McCarthy’s stiff, humorless syntax appealing. I guess this is the way people talk out on the wild western frontier, in long flat sentences, with no commas to … Read the rest
I have tried hard, so very hard, to appreciate William Vollmann, a wildly original postmodernist obsessed with history and human aggression who is considered a great intellect by several people I respect. I’ve eagerly bought his thick, intimidating books, and I have put in solid time trying to read them. … Read the rest
Call it sacrilege … I just can’t get behind this Joan Didion craze. She wins the second position on the Litkicks Overrated Writers List of 2006.
Joan Didion is a skillful and smart writer. But I’ve always considered her a quintessentially cold author, the epitome of the jaded, detached modernist. … Read the rest
Philip Roth once wrote a great, great book. It’s called Goodbye, Columbus and it’s his first book, published in 1959. The title novella is a hilarious, piercing tale of a doomed love affair between a poor bookish urban Jew and a spoiled Jewish-American Princess from the suburbs. The story reaches … Read the rest
