A bonus from Blake Bailey’s Cheever (Knopf, $35): When William Faulkner won the Nobel prize in 1949, Cheever amused himself by imagining what Hemingway would have to say about it:
“I think it’s fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize. … The Nobel Prize is like that purse they give in Verona for Read More
Cheever
By Blake Bailey
Alfred A. Knopf, 770 pages, $35
John Cheever was inordinately fond of the word “inestimable”: It shows up twice in the brief preface to The Stories of John Cheever (1978), the best seller that pushed him at last to the top of the heap (he was now king of the short Read More
Not found time yet to digest Jonathan Littell’s 992-page Holocaust novel, The Kindly Ones (Harper, $29.99), which won two major literary prizes when it was published as Les Bienveillantes in France in 2006? Confused by the fact that it was written in French by an American (a Yale graduate, no less) and then translated into Read More
Exuberant is the best word for Molly Haskell’s Frankly, My Dear (Yale, $24), a slim, unfailingly intelligent, fact-filled book that sets out to explain why Gone With the Wind (both book and movie) exercises such a potent and enduring hold on our imagination. Ms. Haskell, who’s married to The Observer’s own Andrew Sarris, argues convincingly Read More
Amazon seems to think it’s a children’s book (“Reading level: Ages 9–12”); the publishers’ classification over the bar code mentions African-American Studies—but I’d say that Elizabeth Spires’ I Heard God Talking to Me (FSG, $17.95) is a stunningly handsome art book, a fine tribute in poems and photographs to the sculpture of William Edmondson, the Read More
Is there still room in our hearts for a business hero? Wall Street buccaneers are toxic for now, but what about a business titan safely segregated from high-finance chicanery? Kenneth Roman’s The King of Madison Avenue (Palgrave Macmillan, $27.95) is an admiring but clear-eyed portrait of David Ogilvy, arguably the greatest advertising man ever—and a Read More
Among the many tributes to John Updike, perhaps the most expansive and detailed is Ian McEwan’s fine essay in The Guardian. Mr. McEwan has been publicly praising Updike—the “reticent, kindly man with the ferocious work ethic and superhuman facility”—for decades. Here he trains his craftsman’s eye on the mechanics of Updike’s method:
Read More
John Updike was the first person to make me laugh. I don’t remember this, but I have it on good authority: My father, who was his classmate at college, just sent me this sketch of the scene. The place was Cambridge, Mass.; the year was 1959:
“One day for some reason John came to Read More
Jonathan Raban, a British novelist and travel writer surveying the political landscape of the United States from his adopted home of Seattle, wrote some of the sharpest commentary on the presidential election. He continues his run of excellent essays with a canny reading of President Obama’s Inaugural Address in the Jan. 24 Guardian. He Read More
Grim is the only way to begin the story of Edgar Allan Poe, who was born 200 years ago this week; grim is the only way to end it. In between there’s poverty, drunken sprees, illness, dashed hopes, more drunkenness and a messy heap of bad behavior (Hemingway, operating on the two-birds-one-stone principle, once remarked Read More
