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
That Old Ace in the Hole , by Annie Proulx. Scribners, 384 pages, $26.
Like every other reader of recent fiction, I have some favorites, a charmed circle that includes (thanks for asking) Don DeLillo’s Underworld , Joyce Carol Oates’ What I Lived For , Grace Paley’s Collected Stories , Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater , Read More
A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American
Literary Prose , by B. R. Myers. Melville House, 149 pages, $9.95.
Who dares attack Don DeLillo, the colossus who gave us Underworld , Mao II , Libra , White Noise ? Mr. DeLillo, winner of many prizes, is backed by the love Read More
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
Glamorama , by Bret Easton Ellis. Alfred A. Knopf, 481 pages, $25.
Like all Bret Easton Ellis novels, Glamorama is the kind of roller-coaster ride that thrills some folks and makes others puke. Michiko Kakutani goes green at the mention of his name; her review of Glamorama in The New York Times is the critical Read More
When publishing toffs and literary celebrities opened their invitations to the 48th National Book Awards ceremony this fall and saw the words “Marriott Marquis,” an audible sniff was heard. But they got over themselves, and on the evening of Nov. 18, they gamely made their way to Times Square to mark a year of bombs Read More
There comes a moment-it is scored in the evolving grain of things-when the balance between a father and son draws up even, holds for an instant, and then begins its slow tipping in the new direction. I’m talking about power here. Not physical power, but proprietary, maybe psychological. That which, however defined, forms the archaic Read More
