Several questions linger about the vault that many people believe the late J. D. Salinger left behind, purportedly filled with nearly half a century’s worth of unpublished manuscripts. Is there a vault? Does it really contain books soon to be published? And will the vault prove to be a treasure trove or a Pandora’s box … Continue reading Salinger and the Mysterious Vault
I started reading George Pelecanos in 1997, when he published King Suckerman, which is, of all things, a fictional homage to the “blaxploitation” films of the 1970s. Combining the eccentric flash of Pulp Fiction, the noir soul of David Goodis, and the idiosyncratic heart of Elmore Leonard, this wildly violent novel effectively evokes the comic … Continue reading Pelecanos, Locked and Loaded
It’s the time of year when all of us connected to the publishing world begin speculating about the season’s big books. The major book shows—BookExpo America in May and ALA Annual Conference in June—have come and gone, leaving dozens of potential big books in their wakes. Now comes the predicting, the opinion swapping, and, one … Continue reading Marisha Pessl’s Night Film Leaves a Lasting Impression
I have no beef against dogs, but I’m not a fan of dog books: too smarmy (especially when the damn dogs talk) and way too heartbreaking when the damn dogs die. That all changes, however, when it’s E. B. White writing about dogs. Or anything else, for that matter. I love his children’s books, of … Continue reading The Grief and Joy of Man’s Best Friend
Helping launch the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done in my many years at Booklist. We had very little time to get the awards off the ground last year. The official announcement that Booklist, RUSA, and Carnegie Corporation of New York would … Continue reading Reading the Carnegie Longlist
I’m a sucker for novels starring war correspondents, especially those set in tropical climes. You know what I’m talking about here—rumpled, sweat-stained seersucker suits; constant consumption of gin and tonics (ostensibly to fight off malaria); a few days’ growth of beard (before that look became hip); and, most important, a sense of constant innuendo hanging … Continue reading Hot Country
In 1978, when I first read Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky, I was a librarian at Timberland Regional Library in Washington State. Doig’s memoir of growing up in the Montana high country as the third member, along with his father and grandmother, of an unconventional but loving family struck me as a very special … Continue reading Visiting Two Medicine Country
I’m hooked on Westerns. Not the genre-blends that are popular today—the cowboy romances and the zombie Westerns—but the real thing: novels set in the Old West, featuring hard-drinking, rugged individualists who are good at doing the things that must be done and doing them with grace under pressure. Except for the setting, that definition also … Continue reading The Wild and Poetic Life of Westerns
What prompted me to return to Gregorian chants? A novel, naturally: The Beautiful Mystery, by Louise Penny, the latest in her wildly popular series starring Armand Gamache, chief inspector of the Sûreté de Québec. That I am an unabashed fan of this series is itself a little surprising. Usually, I prefer my crime fiction to … Continue reading Gregorian Chants Meet Thelonious Monk
We all know about life imitating art, but what about novels imitating film—film noir in particular? Patrick Conrad’s No Sale (the words written in lipstick on a mirror by Gloria Wandrous, the Elizabeth Taylor character in Butterfield 8) is only the latest in a short list of noir fiction that draws on film noir. I’m … Continue reading An Homage to Film Noir
At the recent Public Library Association conference in Philadelphia, my friend and Booklist columnist David Wright, who was giving a presentation on literary fiction, used a term I had never heard, translit, to describe that boundary-breaking kind of novel that shatters all the too-often pigeonholing categories we use to compartmentalize modern fiction. The term, David … Continue reading Translit: New Genre Collapses Time and Space
I was never any good at science, whether it was dissecting a frog or—God help me—completing a science-fair project. My personal nadir came on a chemistry exam in high school. I like to think my score of eight points out of a possible 100 remains, these many decades later, the worst officially posted number in … Continue reading Science for the Nonscientist
