a blind flaneur

Poet Billy Collins has written an introduction for a new edition of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, a 1960s bestseller that ranked with Steppenwolf and The Hobbit in every hippie’s paperback library. The book cover photo of a mustachioed Brautigan surely set a fashion standard for back-to-the-land types. “He looked like a man who [...]

Patti Smith met Robert Mapplethorpe on her first day in New York City in the summer of1967. They were both kids from stern religious backgrounds who yearned to be artists. Smith tells the story of their relationship in a new memoir titled  Just Kids. “Sometimes [people] seem to think I came out of the womb, [...]

I started reading Fear of the Dark by Walter Mosley, and all hope of productive labor today is hereby canceled. It’s the third novel in Mosley’s Fearless Jones series. The erstwhile private eye is a randy but impecunious used book dealer named Paris Minton. My kind of sleuth!

Critic John Powers on Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Inherent Vice:
I know people who swear that Pynchon has saved their lives. But I know others who say he is literally unreadable. Nobody will say that about “Inherent Vice,” his loosey-goosey new take on the L.A. private eye yarn. The scene is Gordita Beach, 1970, and the [...]

We finished Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita today — reading it aloud, mind you — and almost immediately asked ourselves the question posed by the trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie adaptation. “How could they make a movie out of Lolita?” My guess is that the film minimizes Humbert Humbert’s monstrous delusional transgressions, instead playing up Lolita’s [...]

I like to think I am well-read, even as a blind flaneur who works constantly to negotiate access to books. When conversation turns to some obscure old warhorse from the canon, I like to joke that I didn’t finish the book, but I read the Classic Comics. Soon I will have another excuse. “Oh, sure, [...]

Book reviewer David Gates crafts this marvelous phrase in summarizing a scene from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy:
Early in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels, the inwardly articulate but outwardly brutish derelict Molloy, used to being immured in his own lurching, stinking body — a pearl of consciousness in an oyster of physicality — tells of finding himself [...]

A cocktail party at George Plimpton’s apartment in 1963; Plimpton is seated at left. [Photo by Cornell Capa/Magnum Photos/NYT]
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter wrote a long essay in the NYT Book Review based on George, Being George, a new oral history of the Paper Lion. Following a recent publishing trend that seems to hark back [...]

One of my First Amendment heroes, Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, received a lifetime achievement award today from the National Book Foundation. Rosset published the first American edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and he fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court for the right to do so. He tells the story [...]

French Writer Wins Nobel Prize – NYT 101008:
The French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, whose work reflects a seemingly insatiable restlessness and sense of wonder about other places and other cultures, won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. In its citation, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Le Clézio, 68, as the “author of [...]