“‘World’s End’ by Pablo Neruda”
“World’s End,” originally published in Spanish in 1969, toward the end of the career of the great poet Pablo Neruda (he died in 1973, soon after the coup that killed his friend and compatriot Chilean President Salvador Allende), is a book-length sequence that weaves together the personal and the political, the public and the private, the domestic and the global.”
“Patrick White’s cruel visionaries”
Patrick White, the first great novelist to come out of Australia, was born in 1912, won the Nobel Prize in 1973, died in 1990 and his work promptly dropped from fashion. His style of narrative-driven psychological modernism seemed outmoded, perhaps, when the highbrow section of the literary marketplace had turned to the exuberant post-modernism…
“Dreams of a dreamer”
Eric Kraft is an oddball, an eccentric, a bit of a genius — the writerly equivalent of a dreamer who puts together weird and wonderful contraptions in his garage. For almost 30 years, and through many books, he has been crafting “The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences and Observations of Peter Leroy,”…
“New in paperback: Richard Yates, Denis Johnson, Charles Baxter and more”
Barry Day (ed): “The Letters of Noel Coward” (Vintage)”The human race is a let down. It thinks it’s progressed but it hasn’t. It thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime but it hasn’t — it’s still wallowing in it!,” says Gilda in Noel Coward’s 1930s play “Design for Living.”
“Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America’ by Louis Adamic”
Louis Adamic is the forgotten Boswell of early Los Angeles, perhaps the first writer to tune himself into the then-youthful city and report back. Born in Slovenia in either 1898 or 1899 (records differ), he passed through Ellis Island in 1913 and served in the U.S. Army during World War I before settling in San Pedro where, through most of the 1920s…
“New in paperback”
Al Alvarez: “The Biggest Game in Town” (Picador)Back in the early 1970s, Al Alvarez wrote “The Savage God,” a study of suicide which contributed in no small part to the mythology that came to surround his friend, the great poet Sylvia Plath. A poet himself, and one who had attempted suicide…
“Exquisite strangers”
When money will have nothing to do with me, when the only voice I hear is my own and all my books are having a great laugh at my expense — especially Lowell who doesn’t think I’m a man at all —
“‘Humboldt’s Gift’ by Saul Bellow”
Humboldt’s Gift,” first published in 1975 and just re-issued (Penguin: 512 pp., $16), is both a crazy mess of a novel and an abiding testament to the vital exuberance of Saul Bellow’s genius. “The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit.
“New in paperback: : Getting personal”
“Good Friday. I neither fast nor make any observations of this somber time. I roam from the post office to the church, unsober. The central altar is dark, but on the left the priest has improvised a Mary chapel where there is a blaze of candles and lilies and someone keeps the vigil.
“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’ by Michael Chabon”
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” was first published back in 1988 and immediately tagged a “brat pack” novel, causing its author, the then preposterously young Michael Chabon (he was still only in his early 20s) to be spoken of in the same breath as Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz — admirable enough writers whose careers, it’s fair to say, he has by now wholly eclipsed.
Reasons to shiver: New in paperback
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III” edited by Philip Gourevitch (Picador)”Have you found any professional criticism of your work illuminating or helpful? Edmund Wilson, for example?” asks Julian Jebb, the guy sent by the Paris Review to interview Evelyn Waugh back in 1963. Waugh replies succinctly, superbly: “Is he an American?”
“The Brass Verdict,’ by Michael Connelly”
I DON’T know where I will go or what cases will be mine,” said Mickey Haller at the end of Michael Connelly’s 2005 bestseller “The Lincoln Lawyer.” Haller — a defense attorney who worked Los Angeles County courthouses out of the back of three Lincoln Town Cars — had solved the mystery and been gut-shot for his pains.
“The Truman show”
Dearest Cecil,” wrote Truman Capote from Brooklyn on April 19, 1965, addressing his friend, the English photographer and bon vivant Cecil Beaton. The letter is among those collected in “Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote” (Vintage: 512 pp., $16 paper). “This is just an exhausted scrawl (you owe me a letter anyway)…
“New in paperback: The pioneers of the police procedural, Iraq by way of Homer and the Crusades through Muslim eyes”
Immoveable Feast” by John Baxter (Harper Perennial)Baxter, the film critic and biographer of Spielberg, Buñuel and others, fell in love and moved from Los Angeles to Paris some years back, from whence he has dispatched a series of fluent, witty and moving memoirs. The first, “A Pound of Paper,” detailed his obsession with books and his early, failed, literary scufflings.
“At the speed of pulp”
Richard Stark created the character of Parker, a nerveless professional thief, all the way back in 1963, in “The Hunter” ( University of Chicago Press: 198 pp., $14 paper). Stark was, and is, a pseudonym for Donald Westlake, then a young writer so inventive and wildly fecund that he had no option but to publish under other names.
“New in paper at your local bookstore”
Born Standing Up” by Steve Martin (Scribner)Here’s Steve Martin, describing his first appearance on “The Tonight Show”: “What happened while I was out there was very similar to an alien abduction: I remember very little of it, though I’m convinced it occurred.” Later, having appeared many times, and having gotten to know Johnny Carson…
“Where’s Weldon?”
The poet Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Neb., in 1914, though what’s best known about him is that on July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition in a parking lot on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
“True New Yorker”
About two years ago, when rats came down from a lowquat tree and began scratching around and scuttling around in the crawl space beneath our Venice home, I made my wife laugh (and wince) by reading to her from Joseph Mitchell’s classic 1944 New Yorker piece “The Rats on the Waterfront”.
“Two timeless, Depression-era novels from Edward Anderson”
Edward Anderson had a strange and sad career. He was born in Texas in 1905 and grew up in Oklahoma, serving his apprenticeship as a journalist on a small paper in Ardmore, Okla. Restless, he worked as a deckhand on a freighter, plied his fists as a prizefighter, had some small success as a musician and, when the Great Depression of the 1930s hit, roamed the roads and rails, learning the life of the hobo.
“His wit was hard-boiled”
We think we know Damon Runyon, and we might think we’re pretty jaded about him, but a fat new anthology, ” ‘Guys and Dolls’ and Other Writings” (Penguin: 636 pp., $18 paper), introduced by Pete Hamill and edited and annotated by Cornell professor Daniel R. Schwarz, makes us see afresh a writer whose hard-bitten and ironic point of view prefigures the fictional worlds of “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos.”