New York Times critic Margo Jefferson has written a risky little book on Michael Jackson. “Risky” because, at 146 pages, it avails itself of none of the satisfactions of a proper biography, instead asking us to cough up $20 for the quality of Ms. Jefferson’s thoughts and opinions alone. Also risky because, arriving less than Read More
New York Times critic Margo Jefferson has written a risky little book on Michael Jackson. “Risky” because, at 146 pages, it avails itself of none of the satisfactions of a proper biography, instead asking us to cough up $20 for the quality of Ms. Jefferson’s thoughts and opinions alone. Also risky because, arriving less than Read More
As cataclysms go, it was indelibly British from start to finish. First, there was the weather: a light drizzle of rain. Then there was the iconography: double-decker buses and brollies and bombs wrapped in packages that “looked like a brown jumper on the platform,” as one observer put it. Nothing could have been further from Read More
How scary is real estate? If you’re attempting to find anything in the West Village with two bedrooms below $1 million, then you’re in for the fright of your life, but on cinema screens, we haven’t had a decent haunted-house flick since 1979′s The Amityville Horror. The film came heralded by a classy poster featuring Read More
The Disappointment Artist, by Jonathan Lethem. Doubleday, 149 pages, $22.95. In the summer of 1977, Jonathan Lethem saw the movie Star Wars 21 times. Not that many times, really-if anything, in the annals of Star Wars geekdom, it qualifies as merely a good start-but Mr. Lethem was proud of his record, if only because of Read More
The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst. Bloomsbury, 438 pages, $24.95.
The title of Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Line of Beauty, refers to, amongst other things: Hogarth’s theory of pictorial composition; the line of cocaine snorted by the book’s hero, Nick, from the back of a Henry James novel; and the snaking line Read More
Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum. W.W. Norton and Company, 530 pages, $27.95.
Oh, to be P.G. Wodehouse! There aren’t many authors whose life one actually covets-not really. To come up with a Dorothy Parker witticism might seem like fun for a millisecond, but you’d also be the one to take that multi-bladed brain Read More
Does America have an empire on its hands? In the years since Sept. 11, that’s easily the most vigorous debate among American writers and intellectuals. It used to be that only leftist ideologues accused American foreign policy of being “imperialist,” but as conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer argued in The New York Times, “People are coming Read More
It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir, by Gloria Vanderbilt. Simon & Schuster, 161 pages, $22.
Do you wish that you’d found the time to have sex with Frank Sinatra? Is it a source of eternal regret that—in between bouts at the dry cleaner and walking the dog and the gym—you never Read More
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film , by David Thomson. Alfred A. Knopf, 963 pages, $35.
It looks unassuming enough, just like any other reference book: weighty, blockish and solid as a brick. The author, too, sounds foursquare: a couple of film biographies under his belt, now occasionally writes for The New York Times ; Read More
