The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions , by Rick Moody. Little, Brown and Company, 323 pages, $24.95.
This may not turn out to be the worst book of 2002, but I bet it’s the only contender written by an acclaimed literary novelist, an ambitious writer, skilled and intelligent, who once seemed on the Read More
A few seasons ago, when I saw Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play , her extraordinary tragedy of the American Dream, I wrote that there was no dramatist like her at work in theater today. If there was a more compelling talent on either side of the Atlantic, I didn’t know of it. That’s still the Read More
The Best American Short Stories of the Century , selected by John Updike. Houghton Mifflin, 775 pages, $28.
Never mind that short stories have been more or less profitably published since Nathaniel Hawthorne’s day. Never mind that the O. Henry Awards, named for a master of the form, have ferreted out distinguished works and future Read More
