Archive for August, 2012
In looking through my books, I thought it would be interesting to compile a list of American authors who have contributed to the formation of the modern novel. I took a stab at listing authors and then looked them up on Bookscan to see what their biggest novel was (I may have taken a liberty [...]
Great stories happen to those who know how to tell them. This sums up my respect for Hunter S. Thompson. I read his books in junior high and went slack-jawed at his gonzo lifestyle. He felt like the patron saint of breaking out from the bureaucratic, life killing nonsense, infested with an anger over what [...]
The Middlesteins is the story of a Jewish family living in the suburbs of the mid-west. It centers around Edie, a grandmother whose habit of finding comfort in food has led to a weight problem that affects her entire family. There are points of humor, but for the most part it is a touching portrait [...]
During BEA I was interviewed by Tove Leffler and Lasse WInkler of the Svensk Bokhandel. Here’s a link to the article (an account is needed to read the whole thing):
http://www.svb.se/nyheter/hachette-satsar-p-svenska-deckare?page=8
In 1973, Robert Altman remade Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. The film set Chandler’s noir story of a moral private investigator in an amoral contemporary Los Angeles. Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice makes a similar move, placing the archetype PI, the last good man, in psychedelic California. He drifts through the crime world in a haze [...]
A little while ago I was having coffee with a new friend, the writer of the very entertaining personal-adventure blog Semi-Rad. We were talking about good travel writing, and he mentions Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which happened to be in my bag that day. When talking about personal journeys, self-discovery, [...]
Recently l began reading Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. While I find Pynchon’s language to be overly affected (not dissimilar from my recent experience with Salinger) and his characters to lack depth, he is a masterful writer. He puts you as the reader into these crazy scenes and recreates them with such detail that you [...]
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