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Our Critic’s Tip Sheet On Current Reading

A bonus from Blake Bailey’s Cheever (Knopf, $35): When William Faulkner won the Nobel prize in 1949, Cheever amused himself by imagining what Hemingway would have to say about it:

“I think it’s fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize. … The Nobel Prize is like that purse they give in Verona for the Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet On Current Reading: Jonathan Littell Ties Critics in Knots with The Kindly Ones

Not found time yet to digest Jonathan Littell’s 992-page Holocaust novel, The Kindly Ones (Harper, $29.99), which won two major literary prizes when it was published as Les Bienveillantes in France in 2006? Confused by the fact that it was written in French by an American (a Yale graduate, no less) and then translated into Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Gone with the Wind Decoded; Flannery O’Connor’s Feathered Friends; and Amazonian Adventure

Exuberant is the best word for Molly Haskell’s Frankly, My Dear (Yale, $24), a slim, unfailingly intelligent, fact-filled book that sets out to explain why Gone With the Wind (both book and movie) exercises such a potent and enduring hold on our imagination. Ms. Haskell, who’s married to The Observer’s own Andrew Sarris, argues convincingly Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Divine Sculptures; Heavenly Hogwash; and the Immortal Ian McEwan

Amazon seems to think it’s a children’s book (“Reading level: Ages 9–12”); the publishers’ classification over the bar code mentions African-American Studies—but I’d say that Elizabeth Spires’ I Heard God Talking to Me (FSG, $17.95) is a stunningly handsome art book, a fine tribute in poems and photographs to the sculpture of William Edmondson, the Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet On Current Reading: David Ogilvy Admired; Memoirs Miniaturized; and Sexual Perversity Embraced

Is there still room in our hearts for a business hero? Wall Street buccaneers are toxic for now, but what about a business titan safely segregated from high-finance chicanery? Kenneth Roman’s The King of Madison Avenue (Palgrave Macmillan, $27.95) is an admiring but clear-eyed portrait of David Ogilvy, arguably the greatest advertising man ever—and a Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Rabbit Remembered—McEwan, Amis and Others Wave Goodbye

Among the many tributes to John Updike, perhaps the most expansive and detailed is Ian McEwan’s fine essay in The Guardian. Mr. McEwan has been publicly praising Updike—the “reticent, kindly man with the ferocious work ethic and superhuman facility”—for decades. Here he trains his craftsman’s eye on the mechanics of Updike’s method:

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Obama’s Inaugural Stealth; Guantánamo by Foot; the Sad Truth About Benjamin Button

Jonathan Raban, a British novelist and travel writer surveying the political landscape of the United States from his adopted home of Seattle, wrote some of the sharpest commentary on the presidential election. He continues his run of excellent essays with a canny reading of President Obama’s Inaugural Address in the Jan. 24 Guardian. He Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: The Triumphant Return of Jayne Anne Phillips

In a sidebar in the Jan. 12 issue of The New Yorker, Hilton Als quotes Paul Celan about surviving the Nazi death camps:

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.”

In the first dozen pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ remarkable Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Lincoln 24/7; Bush and The Great Gatsby; Smith’s Self-Absorption

Are you ready for all Lincoln all the time? Do you worry that you’ll need some help in cutting through the bicentennial blather? If you’re looking for a quick refresher (as opposed, say, to the two-part, six volume mythologizing biography Carl Sandburg completed in 1939), try The Best American History Essays on Lincoln (Palgrave Macmillan, Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Short and Sharp from Melville House; Wallace Stevens’ Deep Freeze; and Obama’s Muse

It's never too late to come up with a literary stocking stuffer, at least as long as your neighborhood bookstore is open on Christmas Eve. What you’re looking for, of course, is something not too big that packs a punch. Isn’t that precisely the definition of a novella?

Melville House, the small press based in Brooklyn Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Jackie and La Joconde; Gore Vidal On Air; and a Long Lost Campus Novel

NOT EVERY KENNEDY BOOK (see page 39) is about a sinister, implausible conspiracy that ends in violent death and wrenching national tragedy. Margaret Leslie Davis’ Mona Lisa in Camelot (Da Capo, $24.95), which was excerpted in last month’s Vanity Fair, brings back all the glamour and high hopes of the Kennedy White House with the Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Waiting for Santa; Sontag on Writers; and Milton’s Misery

Is it just me, or is there a kind of suspended-animation feel to these mid-December weeks? Santa Claus is coming to town, but he’s not here yet; Barack Obama is coming, too, but that’s not till January. ’Tis the season to be waiting—and to help us understand our predicament, we have Harold Schweizer’s On Waiting Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Proust Junkies’ Delight; Luscious Love from the Louvre; and Brooklyn Bridge Adored

What to give literati who have everything? Eric Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (Thames & Hudson, $45). If the reader in question is already hooked on Proust, Mr. Karpeles’ gorgeous book is guaranteed to please; and if he or she has yet to plunge into the seven Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: America the Multiple; Pet Peeves from Across the Pond; Martian Pick-Up Lines

If things had gone the other way in the presidential election, who’d be buying a book urging us to take pride in our country? Luckily, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey had the good sense to bet on Obama and a boom in patriotism among bookish folk. Their apple pie anthology, State by State: A Panoramic Read More

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Truman Capote’s Ageless Girl-About-Town

Vintage is celebrating Holly Golightly’s 50th birthday by issuing a special anniversary edition of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Vintage, $12.95). I hate to quibble, but she was actually two months shy of 19 when the novel came out in 1958—so by that count she’s pushing 70. Or if you want to get persnickety about it, when Read More