An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America , by Gary Cross. Columbia University Press, 320 pages, $27.50.
So here we are in the middle of a campaign race, and what is likely to be this week’s most rousing topic at the water cooler? 1) Gee, I miss Bill Bradley. 2) Will Ralph Nader Read More
On a recent Sunday evening at Babbo restaurant, a literary agent regarded a plate of beef-cheek ravioli. Waiters crisscrossed the room with orders of pasta. The restaurant was full. The city was quiet. It was the kind of peaceful, comfortable night that has been falling over Manhattan for quite some time now.
Suddenly, the conversational Read More
If John J. Sirica Jr. has his way, a little bit of Renata Adler’s memoir Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker might be gone sometime soon. On Valentine’s Day, the son of the late Watergate judge faxed Simon & Schuster Trade Division editor-in-chief Michael Korda requesting the removal of certain passages about his Read More
In case it’s unclear, Susan Sontag really is against interpretation. Of her own life, that is. She has risen in protest again, this time of W.W. Norton’s unauthorized biography of her.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux president and founder Roger Straus has written to Norton editor in chief Starling Lawrence on Ms. Sontag’s behalf, to express Read More
On Feb. 17, I ventured out to Snooky’s Restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to see about Dave Eggers. For weeks, the press had been tracking Mr. Eggers and his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius . I was intrigued. I knew Mr. Eggers was 29, well connected and edited a quirky literary magazine, called Read More
If you want to be a millionaire, you could sit down with Regis Philbin and sweat it out under weird lights while a studio audience weighs in on whether a morel belongs to the mushroom family. Or you could write a disaster book. Just find a tragedy, round up a cast of surviving characters, nab Read More
“My Lolita does not speak in Nabokov’s language,” said Pia Pera.
It was 4 P.M. on a Friday, about the time one’s blood sugar faints away, and Ms. Pera was at New York University’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, on West 12th Street, for an “espresso talk.” The subject was her new novel, Lo’s Diary , Read More
If you were wondering what might send the world’s third-largest media conglomerate into a swivet, look out the window: There’s a 7 percent vacancy rate in midtown Manhattan, and Bertelsmann A.G., the $16.4 billion German-based behemoth, is feeling the strain. They may know how to partner up with everyone from venture capitalists to Web geeks Read More
By sunrise on Oct. 26, the losses were already steep for St. Martin’s Press and its Thomas Dunne Books imprint. By then, the house had lost 90,000 books’ worth of sunk costs and a good deal of face after it was revealed a few days earlier that J.H. Hatfield, author of Fortunate Son: George W. Read More
Ten weeks out of an intensive care unit, Sonny Mehta could be found in Bemel-mans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, hunting for cashews in a silver bowl. He asked for a glass of Côtes du Rhône and popped a cashew. Mr. Mehta, the editor in chief and president of Alfred A. Knopf Inc., and president Read More
