Articles by Bill Morris
May 15, 2013
Still Merry and Bright? Rethinking Henry Miller 8
Few possess Miller’s courage, his willingness to walk away from the American dream and embrace a life without hope. Fewer still manage to be what Miller claimed to be in the face of hopelessness – always merry and bright.
May 3, 2013
Herblock Loved the Little Guy and Hated Nixon’s Guts 6
Herblock drew McCarthy and Nixon with swarthy mugs, sweating, frequently crawling out of mud puddles or open sewer holes. Herblock hated Nixon’s guts and wasn’t shy about saying so. In our watered-down, fair-minded times, such venom is bracing.
April 25, 2013
Rachel Kushner Is Well On Her Way to Huge 8
It was only when Kushner started writing her book that she made a discovery that is vital to any novelist trying to spin fiction out of historical events: the great danger is emptying your notebook, becoming lulled by your research into forgetting that novels are, first and last, works of the imagination.
April 15, 2013
James Ross’s They Don’t Dance Much Returns From the Grave. Again. 3
Read this dark dirty lovely country-noir masterpiece already.
March 21, 2013
Lives within Lives within Lives: Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives 2
There is, it seems, no end to the lives of Aleksandar Hemon.
March 14, 2013
Dominique Morisseau’s 20/20 Vision of Detroit 1
The city’s problems — and the historical sources of those problems — are being addressed in a clear-eyed fashion by a new generation of writers who are able to see beyond the tired cliches, beyond ruin porn and rosy optimism, beyond the finger-pointing and the exhausted racial-political rhetoric.