UPDATED (at end): Since the death of J.D. Salinger, there’s been scads of comment declaring his books as life-changers (or not) and plenty of speculation on what waits in his safe to be published or what might be made into a movie and even some of that personal, David Copperfield kind…

[Read more →]

What is it that’’s invisible” in Paul Auster’s latest novel? It’s not the truth. The truth is there… somewhere … though choosing it from all the various claims and denials batted around by three different narrators and one or two other characters might be an impossible task. Or maybe it’s…

[Read more →]

Like much of Nick Hornby’s work, Juliet, Naked is not a book about love in the traditional sense. It’s a book for those of us who are obsessively in love with music, so much in love that it defines us when so little else does. We identify with someone’s art, and…

[Read more →]

Jeanette Winterson’s review in the New York Times of Joan Schenkar’s biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith draws a connection between not only Highsmith’s plot sequencing and the six-panel comic but Highsmith’s–and her characters’–personalities as well. Highsmith, who died in 1995, wrote Strangers…

[Read more →]

It’s not too late to appreciate Chris Ware’s cover and story in The New Yorker’s November 2  “Cartoon Issue.” Young trick-or-treaters stand at doorways, their faces hidden behind white masks, while their parents wait back on the sidewalk, their faces masked in illumination from their personal communication devices. What a great…

[Read more →]

When we last saw Duane Moore in Larry McMurtry’s 2007 novel When the Light Goes, he was a sixty-something malcontent who had just found age-old happiness with a much younger woman. When we first saw him back in 1966, in McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, he was a sexually confused…

[Read more →]

Reading Rhino Ranch, the latest installment in Larry McMurtry’s on-going Duane Moore saga that began in 1966 with The Last Picture Show, was a bit of deja-vu all over again. The last three books of the series are of a sort. The town of Thalia is still dying. Sexual frustration continues…

[Read more →]

Hugh Hefner may have had dozens of girlfriends over his 83 years, but his life-long love is jazz. Hefner declared his undying devotion to swing and big band music when the Rabbit interviewed him in 2008 for an inside story, “Jazz Playboy Style.” With all the recent attention, good and…

[Read more →]

What would Carl Jung say about the current state of political discourse in America? The Rabbit’s been rereading the founder of analytical psychology’s The Undiscovered Self in preparation for Liber Novus, a “new” book which records Jung’s middle age conflict or, in pop-psychology parlance, mid-life crisis. Undiscovered is one of Jung’s most…

[Read more →]

The author of The Mystery Guest explains his strange conception, his twisted upbringing and how a glimpse of a friend’s naked mother, followed by a street riot, seems to repeat itself every time he falls in love.

[Read more →]