This is not meant as a put-down of Roth; I think Marquand is great. P.S. Is this what a Twitter post is like? Basically, I’m too lazy to back up my statement here with evidence. But I think that any … Continue reading →

I don’t think there are many remaining fans of George V. Higgins: he died 20 years ago, his popularity had been in decline for decades, and his only bestseller was his first book, in 1970, which was also made into … Continue reading →

Tyler Cowen links approvingly to this review by B. R. Myers of a book that I haven’t read. Unlike Cowen, I haven’t seen the book in question–so far, I’ve only read the excerpt that appeared in the New Yorker–but I can say that I found Myers’s review very annoying. Myers writes: Continue reading →

Via J. Robert Lennon, I discovered this amusing blog by Anis Shivani on “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers.” Lennon found it so annoying that he refused to even link to it, but I actually enjoyed Shivani’s bit of … Continue reading →

Helen DeWitt writes about The Ask, the new book by Sam Lipsyte, author of a hilarious book I read a couple years ago about a loser guy who goes to his high school reunion. I haven’t read Lipsyte’s new book … Continue reading →

I read Richard Cook’s biography of Alfred Kazin recently. It was surprisingly interesting—I say “surprisingly” because Kazin didn’t live a particularly eventful life. I wanted to read the book in the first place because I like a lot of Kazin’s … Continue reading →