The story today in The New York Times about the birth –rather than the death– of an independent bookstore is cause for celebration. Novelist Ann Patchett, joining with much of Nashville’s reading community, has spurred the opening of Parnassus Books after the closing of the city’s  Davis-Kidd bookstore last December. It was…

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Walter Mosely’s meditation on his first memories in The New York Times is a detailed account of awakening consciousness. Mosely, at the age of three — the year most likely is 1955  –  opens his eyes in front of the television in his parents’ home. He is suddenly flooded with images and…

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Spalding Gray struck me as the perfect balance of author and performer, someone who wrote well and revealingly of himself and then brought that self to the stage. As a long time Gray fan, I was anticipating the release of The Journals of Spalding Gray this month until I read the…

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Tom McGuane came to our small town’s independent bookstore when his latest novel, Driving On the Rim, was released. Reading and answering questions in a place about 20 miles from where (presumably) Rim takes place, McGuane proved himself considered, thoughtful, insightful and modest. A handsome man with an easy way about…

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Albert Snyder’s murder in 1927 at the hands of his wife and her lover gave James M. Cain — and others –  ideas. As Literary Legend has it, the killing inspired Cain twice, once in Double Indemnity and again with The Postman Always Rings Twice . The actual incident was the perfect combination…

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Noir is like porno: You know it when you see it.  You can see it everywhere. Films — its most referenced birthplace– and literature (yes, literature, pulp included) and, don’t forget, comics. Its most recognized characteristic defines it as urban set piece dating from the 1940s; though, in its way,…

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Just what the nemesis is in Philip Roth’s latest novel,  if there’s to be only one, isn’t clear. Polio? Certainly. But maybe it’s God. Or even our superstition and ignorance. Or life, as in mortal,  itself.

Or maybe it’s just playground instructor Bucky Cantor’s proclivity to take things too seriously, particularly…

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The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a ghetto variation of the Faust myth. An aged man makes a deal with the devil so that he may settle with the past. Ptolemy Grey is 91 and living in an unkempt  South-Central Los Angeles apartment. He sleeps under the kitchen table,…

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Can a book be about so many things that it leaves readers wondering what the book is really about? That’s what novelist Malena Watrous suggests in her New York Times review of Paul Auster’s Sunset Park. Auster’s book frames classic themes — brother-against-brother, father-and-son alienation, Lolita-like attraction, fading beauty and failing endeavor…

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Now here’s something: a collection of poetry inspired by a comic strip. Monica Youn’s Ignatz is surprisingly like George Herriman’s classic cartoon: suggestive, surreal, catty. It’s focus, despite its comic derivation, is the caginess of love,  it’s impact on psychology and our perceptions. There are two voices speaking here, Krazy Kat…

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