Adam Begley, The Observer‘s longtime book review editor, has signed on with HarperCollins to write a biography of John Updike, who died last month of lung cancer at the age of 76. Mr. Begley sold the book through the literary agent George Borchardt, and will be edited by Tim Duggan. The publication date is Read More
Who is Eddie Hayes?
If you have to ask, he hasn’t done his job.
Mouthpiece, the title of his lively, entertaining and utterly unapologetic autobiography, makes him sound like a flak, but he’s actually a lawyer—a “big-city lawyer,” he likes to say—with a colorful history of high-profile clients who come to him Read More
It’s surely not Jay McInerney’s fault that the author of the hilariously unconvincing Amazon review of his new novel is none other than James Frey, whose name is now synonymous with unreliable. Mr. Frey claims to believe that The Good Life is Mr. McInerney’s best book since Bright Lights, Big City (1984), and also that Read More
We all saw the photo on the cover of The New York Times Magazine: a skeletal Joan Didion showing us up close the real-time re-enactment of a widow’s pain—the image of bereavement blown up like a billboard.
One glance at that photo and you’re primed for the lesson of The Year of Magical Read More
New York Apartments: Private Views, by Jamee Gregory. Rizzoli, 208 pages, $50.
“The very rich are different from you and me,” Fitzgerald insisted, and if Hemingway had been a New Yorker, he would have replied, “Yes, they have nicer apartments.” Not just nicer, to judge from Jamee Gregory’s sumptuous coffee-table book, but exponentially nicer-so much Read More
In the Shadow of No Towers , by Art Spiegelman. Pantheon, 42 pages, $19.95.
Of all the prizes and honors heaped over the years on Maus , Art Spiegelman’s great Holocaust cartoon, perhaps none was more telling than the distinction of appearing on The New York Times ‘ best-seller list first as a work Read More
Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants , by Robert Sullivan. Bloomsbury, 242 pages, $23.95.
Robert Sullivan’s Rats is a strange book. The peculiarities extend even to the acknowledgments, a long list of names – and that’s it-in which Anna Wintour appears twice (in a book about rodents?). Read More
“Novelist” is too fragile a title for Toni Morrison. She’s more like a continent, or at least a landmass-solid, impregnable, a blunt fact. Book reviews won’t budge her: One can’t imagine her noticing them. Her indifference-even if it’s only an imagined indifference-
exposes the triviality of literary journalism. (Last week’s reverential profile in The New Read More
The Fabulist: A Novel , by Stephen Glass. Simon & Schuster, 342 pages, $24.
Have you ever seen on the cover of a book the words “A NOVEL” in type exactly as large as both the title and the author’s name? That’s the billing Simon & Schuster has given Stephen Glass’ The Fabulist Read More
The Time of Our Singing , by Richard Powers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 631 pages, $27.
Richard Powers is an integrationist. In novel after novel, he mixes apples and oranges, slots square pegs into round holes and sweet-talks the lion into lying down with the lamb, eager to heal our”endlessearthly schisms.” Mostly the incompatibles Read More
