By Emily Witt 12:24pm

National Book Award

LaValle.

Victor LaValle, National Book Award Judge, Says Awards Not Irrelevant

After the National Book Awards finalists were named last week, Laura Miller wrote a column for Slate called “How the National Book Awards Made Themselves Irrelevant.” Calling the award “the Newbery Medal for adults” she stated that “whatever policy each panel of judges embraces, over the years, the impression has arisen that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention.” Read More

By Maria Russo 7/06/10 9:58pm

Private Lives

The Postmodern Hester Prynne

Oh, these naughty alpha males and their uncontrollable libidos! We’ve had a parade of powerful men in picture-perfect marriages, exposed as lying horndogs: John Edwards, Mark Sanford, Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer, now even (allegedly) Al Gore. And just look at their lovely, betrayed wives, each one “handling” the situation with her own brand of dignity. Read More

By Damian Da Costa 12/09/08 10:36pm

Back Through that Wardrobe

The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia
By Laura Miller
Little, Brown, 311 pages, $25.99

We live in an age of relentless fascination, even obsession, with what we might as well call Middle-youth, that achy, anxious period of early adolescence marked by overpuffed independence, sexual confusion and passion for sweet soda pop and brightly Read More

By Laura Miller 3/31/03 12:00am

All Day in a Rich Guy’s Limo Makes for a Very Silly Novel

Cosmopolis , by Don DeLillo. Scribner, 209 pages, $25.

Soon after Sept. 11, editors began phoning novelists to commission essays, in the hope that literary writers could offer a better, deeper response to the attacks than mere journalists could. Don DeLillo’s name turned up at the top of everyone’s wish list. That’s how we think Read More

By Laura Miller 1/29/01 12:00am

Eighteen Pages of Genius – Then Modernist Mandarinism

The Body Artist , by Don DeLillo. Scribner, 129 pages, $22.

In what’s becoming a signature of Don DeLillo’s fiction, The Body Artist begins with a tour de force that the remainder of the book can’t quite live up to. ( Underworld , an entirely different sort of book, has the same structural quirk.) The Read More

By Gabriel Snyder 12:00am

What’s With the Big Dot-Com Shakeout?

For a while, in the glow of expanding stock market wealth, dot-com journalists pretty much had free run of the place. Get a faux-visionary C.E.O. to tell a good story in front of the money men about “vertical-market penetration” and “hypersyndication” and liberate the ratings-sensitive, focus-group-approved, newsstand-driven old media from its prisons while a new Read More