Out of nowhere in Rick Moody’s new novel The Four Fingers of Death, there is a gay sex scene involving two astronauts flying on a rocket ship to Mars. “There was a sharp stabbing sensation, sort of how I imagine it must feel to find your innards impaled on a pike,” Mr. Moody Read More
“I think this year is just a freak year,” said the writer Salman Rushdie, during a wine-and-cheese reception at the Instituto Cervantes on Wednesday, March 25, to announce the lineup for next month’s fifth annual PEN World Voices Festival, “when just to be able to do it at all is an achievement—and Read More
Former critic Dale Peck once famously called Rick Moody "the worst writer of his generation," but is he also the worst musician at band camp?
That’s precisely Mr. Moody’s concern in an essay about his experiences at Music Omi International Musicians Residency in the 2008 Music Issue of The Believer.
Here’s how Read More
Dale Peck and Rick Moody are not in a fight anymore. They actually e-mailed recently, and next Tuesday night, they will appear, together, at a book-themed charity bake sale at the Montauk Club that will benefit Sangam House, a nonprofit writer’s colony in India. This is a startling thing, because Mr. Peck once reviewed one Read More
Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas
By Rick Moody
Little, Brown, 223 pages, $23.99
Rick Moody’s fiction has always had a strong topical streak: He’s as concerned with particular aspects of contemporary American society—the barrenness of mass consumerism, say, or the tragically limited economic and aesthetic scope of the lower middle-class, or the dangers Read More
The culture of public shame got a nice massage this week with the publication of The Smoking Gun’s newest tome, The Dog Dialed 911. How dare the document-driven reporters issue a new book (on shelves in two weeks!). Have they not thought yet to respond to the attack by novelist Rick Moody in Read More
On a warm June evening, the novelist Rick Moody sat on the floor of the placid backroom of the Ludlow Street bar Pianos, peeking out from beneath the brim of a porkpie hat at a shag-haired musician named Hannah Marcus. She was crooning about “dragon fruit” and stealing lap blankets from United Airlines. They were Read More
Judy Blume snarled! Whatever will we tell our kids? At a cocktail reception an hour before she was to become the first children’s-book author ever awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters on Nov. 17, the cherished queen bee of kid lit bared her teeth at what we frankly thought Read More
Hatchet Jobs: Cutting Through Contemporary Literature , by Dale Peck. The New Press, 228 pages, $23.95.
Dale Peck is not the best literary critic of his generation. He’s not even second-best. It’s also true that there are pitifully few writers in his generation who could plausibly be called literary critics (the rest just write Read More
Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible , by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. Free Press, 304 pages, $25.
Quick story: One summer midnight at age 19, I found myself hitching back to Brown from a near-deadly car crash in Truth or Consequences, N.M., when I was picked up by a splinter group of Okie Read More
