Reviews

Truth Through Deception: On Norah Vincent’s Thy Neighbor

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Ms. Vincent has produced her first novel. It's called Thy Neighbor and, like its two non-fiction predecessors, it's built on the premise that truth is best reached by a road paved with deception. The protagonists in all three books are voyeurs, people who use deceit to make themselves invisible, literally or figuratively, so they can see people in their most unvarnished states.
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Books as Objects Essays

Prescriptivists vs. Descriptivists: The Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary

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For all its many virtues, the fifth edition is not perfect. Its one glaring flaw is an introductory essay written by the chairman of the Usage Panel, Steven Pinker, a Harvard University linguist and cognitive scientist who is also an avowed descriptivist. What's that whirring noise I hear? Is it William Morris, who died in 1994, spinning in his grave?
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Essays

Who Wrote the Great New Jersey Novel?

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They try to form a band, they do drugs, they light themselves on fire, they fall off roofs. It's all so New Jersey.
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Essays

At Last, Harley Earl Gets Some Respect

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We need to talk about Harley Earl. And about how he changed my life and the lives of millions of Americans who have never heard his name.
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Staff Picks

The Mad Music of Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane

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Though there's plenty of action -- and more than a little of the old Ultra Violence -- the real star here is Barry's language, the music of it. Every page sings with evocative dialog, deft character sketches, impossibly perfect descriptions of the physical world.
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Lists

The Appeals and Perils of the One-Word Book Title

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At their best, one-word titles distill content to its purest essence, which is what all titles strive to do, and then they stick in the mind. Sometimes, of course, they fall flat, and much of the time they're just lukewarm and vague or, worse, falsely grand.
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Essays

The Treacherous Journey From Page to Screen

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The overused word "unfilmable" should be banished from the lexicon.
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Lists

The Riches of White Trash

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Are poor rural white people really neglected in American literature? Hardly. They might be routinely scorned, marginalized, misunderstood, and reduced to caricature, but they’re not neglected. In fact, the canon is larded with writers who’ve put the riches of white trash culture to wondrous use.
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Curiosities

The Writer’s Bedroom

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Staff Picks

John Leonard Died for Our Sins

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I view Leonard not as some vaporous highbrow, but as a prolific, wide-eyed, and deeply erudite observer of the passing contemporary scene, equally at home writing about sitcoms and Nobel laureates, happy to show his face on television, and as willing to cash a paycheck from Playboy as from The New York Review of Books. For him, it was always the message, never the medium.
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The Millions Interview

Scott Donaldson on the “Impossible Craft” of Writing Biography

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If you fall in love with your subject, you can so identify with your subject that you lose something of your own self to it. The first two biographers of Malcolm Lowry who was a suicide, they both killed themselves. Maybe they had that inclination to begin with. But that can happen.
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Essays

Blink vs. Think: When a Movie Bewitches A Writer

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Geoff Dyer, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Lethem, for all their differences, have one thing in common. Each became bewitched by a movie that spoke so forcefully to him that he watched it again and again until it revealed all of its secrets.
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Curiosities

Hatchet Job Prize

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Staff Picks

Staff Pick: John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead

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Every word I say or write about John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead turns instantly to mush. Yes, he's that good.
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Reviews

Nihilists Have Feelings, Too: Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory

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Michel Houellebecq may be a petty misanthrope and an average prose stylist, but he can also be drop-dead funny.
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Bill Morris

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This year I read a book that was so good it gave me that sick-sweet feeling of envy-awe when I finished the last page. Damn, I thought, I wish I’d written that!
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Reviews

Battle of the Heavyweights: Errol Morris vs. Susan Sontag

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Book lovers love to watch two heavyweights slug it out. Bloodshed, though not necessary, is always welcome.
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Quick Hits

A Small Gallery of Literary Giants

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Since I'm convinced that people tend to be more interesting once they're dead, obituaries have always been my favorite part of the newspaper. So whenever a noteworthy writer died, I started drawing the picture that accompanied the obit, eventually adding drawings of noteworthy long-dead writers. Here, then, is a gallery of a few of those literary giants, along with brief explanations of what was going through my head as my pen was fashioning their heads.
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