Out of the Past
I would come to the Parker novels with fresh, innocent eyes, like a newborn fawn staring at the world for the first time, or at a pair of headlights.
All Essays
Twilight of the Boosters
On Tom Perrotta’s post-millennial suburban humanism.
The Most Versatile of Mystics
On insiders, outsiders, and the debate over Sri Ramakrishna’s sexuality.
Criticism of Criticism of Criticism
Advertisements for Norman Mailer
Mailer's false accents — Texas, Patrician, boxer-tough — are like Orson Welles's false noses.
Counter-Culture Colophon Part II: Grove Press in the 1960s
The second installment of Glass’s history of
Barney Rosset’s legendary publishing empire.
In Limbo
"We will all be destroyed whether we like it or not. I say let's like it."
Hard Stuff
2011 is turning out to be a banner year for crime fiction.
An Unfinishable Work
On buildings, plots, and mourning at Ground Zero.
Be Thou the Voice
So it is with memoir; the facts take a backseat to the truth of memory, to the quality of feeling.
Counter-Culture Colophon
On Barney Rosset and the history of Grove Press
Just Like a Woman
The shadow of the culture wars falls over these books, and Jane Austen becomes both the rescued and the rescuer.
Letter from London: Lost in the Supermarket
Searching for a political meaning in the London "shopping riots."
A Portis Reader
Not to mention that if you have to call a thing "True," it’s probably not.
Perfectly Plausible Worlds
He is both a post-national and post-postmodern writer on the one hand and quite simply a page-turner on the other.
Quotidian Stories
When asked which I might recommend that may have passed readers' notice, I settled on work by Jill Ciment and Jane Gardam.