Tuesday is book release day, and the top book release from yesterday is no secret. In fact, Houghton Mifflin dubbed September 16th as “Indignation Day” to celebrate the release of Philip Roth’s latest. Though I’m not at all a big fan of Roth (I feel as if he keeps writing the same book over and [...]
I happened across a post on the National Book Foundation site with the same title. In their article, past finalists or winners of the National Book Award were asked what books changed their life and/or influenced their writing style. Forgetting the “writing style” angle for now, I found the “changed my life” query to be [...]
Aravind Adiga and Steve Toltz both survived the cut from thirteen novels to only six that were named to the shortlist for The Man Booker Prize 2008. Just as surprising to me was previous winners John Berger and Salman Rushdie failed to make it—Sebastian Barry is the only previously shortlisted novelist to make the shortlist [...]
Of James Salter, Richard Ford, writing in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Light Years, said, “It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today.”
It is said that when the late Joseph Fox, famed literary editor at Random House, was asked [...]
I awoke this morning to the news that David Foster Wallace had died yesterday at the age of 46. Apparently, his wife Kate arrived home to find he had hanged himself. Whether or not you were a fan of his fiction, the tragedy of his death cannot be denied. Terrible news.
