Alfred A Knopf have posted a Facebook page, laughingly entitled American Men of Letters. I say laughingly as if their five American Men of Letters (they presumably mean United States) are the best they can do, God help US letters. They have done it in, to use a US expression, a half-assed way with a … Read more
A recent study has concluded that US writers are more emotional than British ones, at least since around 1960 (they were about the same before). This is not a major surprise, except, perhaps, to Bridget Jones. However, what the study does not mention is what books they used, apart from the fact that they were … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Joseph McElroy‘s Actress in the House. This is another somewhat odd novel from McElroy, his first in fifteen years (and the next one won’t be till June 2013, ten years after this one). It starts with an actor slapping an actress, playing his sister, very hard in the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Upton Sinclair‘s The Jungle. This is one of those books (too many, I am afraid) that I should have read long ago but somehow never got around to doing so. While it is not a great novel, it is interesting, as, unlike most novels, it influenced government policy … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Shalom Auslander‘s Hope: A Tragedy, one of the funniest books I have read in a long while. It is very politically incorrect, featuring a still alive but smelly and cantankerous Anne Frank, struggling to write a novel, a Jewish man whose fatal flaw is hope, his mother who … Read more