Clean New Music: On Seamus Heaney

- | 2
I needed Heaney’s voice to know what a voice could sound like, and through Heaney I discovered my own voice. I learned to listen to the timbre of its echoes.
- | 2

Hunting for Red October: Remembering Tom Clancy

- | 4
The genius of Clancy's story, its basic believability, like Tolkien's, comes from a firm commitment to letting the plot unfold logically once the initial hook is in place. It is perhaps difficult to believe there is a ring of power that confirms upon its bearer numinous strength, or that a Russian missile submarine commander, in charge of the newest and most secret sub, would defect along with all his officers. But once you buy the beginning, the rest of the books proceed with rigor.
- | 4

Mr. Leonard Was Different

- | 1
The first times I saw Elmore Leonard were in the 1950s and '60s, when we were living near each other in a Detroit suburb and I was playing football with his kid.
- | 1

The Unfortunate Legacy of Richard Matheson: On the Roots and Unfairly Repellent Qualities of Less-Than-Stellar Film Adaptations

- | 6
It seems worthy of a Twilight Zone episode: Richard Matheson. 87. A writer and screenwriter and noted figure in the annals of contemporary literature. He’s about to find out, though, that simply producing an effective story is not enough. When adaptations are concerned, sometimes, an effective story is just what one needs to produce a completely ridiculous and terrible story. Richard Matheson is entering a world beyond sight and sound. He’s about to arrive…in The Twilight Zone.
- | 6

A Writer’s Role Model: Roger Ebert

- | 2
As much as Roger Ebert “belongs” to film, so too does he belong to us writers. We ought to consider him one of our own.
- | 2

A Champion of Literary Translation: On the Loss of Michael Henry Heim

- | 1
Heim was a man who literally seemed to have more hours in the day than the rest of us. He was someone who pushed for greater visibility of translation in the larger world of American letters, who supported and nurtured would-be translators with every free minute.
- | 1

Under His Spell: Dreaming of Gore Vidal

- | 3
When Buckley called the student protestors crypto Nazis, Vidal said the only crypto Nazi he saw was Buckley. Buckley exploded: “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.” Vidal remained remarkably calm. He broke into a boyish smile, as if he thought Buckley were only joking. Then the smile wavered when he understood how angry the man was.
- | 3

A Teller of Truths: Ray Bradbury’s Middle East Connection

- | 3
My Middle Eastern memorial to Ray Bradbury may seem an unorthodox one, but it is the one he doubtless desired. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he gave an answer that sadly none of the obituarists have recalled
- | 3

RIP MCA

-

Harry Crews and the Death of Southern Literature

- | 12
When we look past the haggard face and the thrilling biography full of fights and fornication, Harry Crews’ fictional world is closer to Kafka’s Eastern Europe than to today’s good ole boy.
- | 12

Remembering Anthony Shadid in Beirut

- | 3
The wind was blowing as morning broke over Beirut. In the kitchen, I poured a glass of milk for our daughter. Firing up the iPhone, there it was: New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid had died on assignment in Syria. He was 43 years old.
- | 3

A Weed in My Flower Garden: Remembering George Whitman of Shakespeare and Company

- | 2
Over the course of 60 years, he gave shelter to almost 40,000 people, many of that desperate genre: the aspiring writer. We would often find scraps of paper under the stairwell that revealed themselves to be thank you notes to George from people like Langston Hughes or Graham Greene or Jacqueline Onassis. And so I, and the many thousands of others who passed through, add our not-quite-as-illustrious thank you notes to theirs.
- | 2

Remembering Hitch

- | 4
It took a particularly potent kind of charisma to allow a person to engage in such concentrated namedropping, urinating all the while, and still manage to come across as utterly charming. Hitchens had that kind of charisma.
- | 4

Good-bye to e-Book Pioneer Michael Hart (and Thanks for Those 36,000+ Freebies)

- | 3
It was Michael Stern Hart of Project Gutenberg who popularized the Net as a book library. He died with more than 36,000 free Gutenberg books on the Web, in 60 languages, as his legacy.
- | 3