MINDFUL PLEASURES

" What matters finally is not the world's judgment of oneself but one's own judgment of the world. Any writer who lacks this fi...

Considered 'New Wave' when first published in 1968, Delany's Nova reads like an old classic today, a space opera that would be...

I'm tempted to demonstrate the excellence of Vollmann's The Atlas by opening the book four times at random and quoting the first l...

Jacoby's Age of American Unreason impresses me less than her earlier Freethinkers , and it probably has less to teach its readers. Alt...

Cane is an amazing book that deserves a place alongside the works of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos , Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe on the t...

The articles collected in Gods and Monsters are a excellent complement to Peter Biskind's definitive history of 1970s Hollywood, Easy ...

In a word: Wow. See Under: Love is a great, beautiful, terrible, difficult novel--as great and beautiful, in its way, as One Hundred Years ...

Like David Grossman's fiction, this slim (130 pages) volume of essays and speeches is highly intelligent and deeply moving. It may also...

The awarding of this year's Nobel Prize to Mario Vargas Llosa surely marks the first time the prize has been given to a writer who has ...

A few minutes ago it was announced in Stockholm that Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has won this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. U...

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers is an important, essential work of American history that's unfortunately married to a naively unproble...

The transcript of an extended interview with David Foster Wallace conducted in early 1996 on the last leg of his Infinite Jest book tour, A...

Jim Tully (1891-1947) was the most successful writer ever to emerge from the train towns and cornfields of rural west central Ohio. A promin...

Yesterday I found it amusing to parody the style of Wittgenstein's Mistress , actually. This is probably because ten years ago I was mad...

Readers of Mindful Pleasures might want to know that my 2008 novel The Degas Manuscript can now be purchased as an Amazon Kindle e-book . ...

Here's a big, ten-years-too-late "Thanks, dude" to David Foster Wallace for recommending Denis Johnson's Angels . This is ...

The paper book is dying. Everybody says so. The publishing industry seems to consider its demise a fait accompli and is struggling to reto...

Inherent Vice is minor Pynchon. I reached that conclusion before page 100, and nothing in the subsequent 269 pages altered it. I enjoyed th...

Henry James's late style pulls an exact reversal on the rhetoric of Realism. Where realistic writers of his day focused on creating a b...

In response to David Foster Wallace's 1999 list (included in my previous post), here's my list of fourteen books that deserve to be ...

In April 1999, Salon magazine published David Foster Wallace's list of " five direly underappreciated U.S. novels since 1960 ....

The essays of William Gass are required reading for anyone interested in American writing. Irrespective of subject matter, Gass's essa...