Jeff at Syntax of Things always locates the coolest items and yesterday was no different. He found this Reuters report about a letter written by William Faulkner that drew nearly $18,000 at auction on Sunday. In the missive, Faulkner complains about being conned into signing a seven year contract with Warner Bros film studio. Some F. Scott Fitzgerald…
Jay McInerney, literary chronicler of New York City, stood in his large window struggling with a broken shade. He wasn’t actually paying attention to the view–he’d seen it many times before: the wide expanse of water towers and fire escapes, the blossom of Wall Street, and the Twin Towers lurching out of the sea. Focusing…
Max Barry’s entertaining new novel was reviewed by Stanley Bing in Sunday’s Washington Post. Bing liked the novel tremendously. Although he felt the characters were a little hollow, which undercut some of the reader’s emotional investment in their lives, the book was still “laugh-out-loud funny, its humor driven by all the pleasure that a true shock…
I was in Las Vegas a couple of weekends ago and I kept thinking about the literature of that city. Of course, my affinity for John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas is well known. But I also kept thinking of a novel that you might have forgotten, or perhaps never knew about in the first place.…