I’ve been meaning to read Ian McEwan’s new novel “Solar” since it came out on March 30 — a new novel by McEwan is always a large treat for me, and I’ve been savoring the prospect of this new read. Despite its somewhat mixed reviews, the premise of this new – and comic – novel Read More
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Author Archive
‘The Lincoln of our literature’
“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came Read More
Mark Twain’s library legacy
Mark Twain: literary lion, steamboat pilot, intrepid adventurer, American legend, and…ferocious critic. As the 100th anniversary of Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ death approaches (on Wednesday), another aspect of Twain’s prolific talent comes to light in a New York Times article regarding his personal book collection. Courtesy of The Mark Twain Library in Redding, CT, hundreds of Read More
Trouble with “The Children’s Book”
I wanted to love “The Children’s Book”, by A.S. Byatt. I really did. It boasted a complex array of characters, a historically fascinating setting, a plot that twisted into the thickets of intrigue and more than a few hints of fantasy — in short, all the elements of a cracking good read. And yet I Read More
Salinger letters emerge
Between the years of 1951 and 1993, Salinger wrote a series of letters to his friend E. Michael Mitchell, a graphic artist who designed the original jacket cover of “The Catcher in the Rye” (that famous red horse), and lived next to Salinger in Westport. Two weeks after his death, eleven letters addressed from the Read More
Holden in the movies?
I came across this article recently about the prospect of filming “Catcher in the Rye”, and whether or not the book really is “unfilmable.” Salinger naturally refused to sell the rights during his lifetime, but with his recent death comes a renewed swirl of intrigue over the idea of a movie. Personally, I think it Read More
“Boy, that kills me” — Holden’s vernacular
One of the most distinctive qualities of Salinger’s prose in “Catcher in the Rye” is breezy, colloquial style of the language. In a way, Holden’s mode of self-expression follows in the tradition of Huck Finn’s, and the task of writing in a specific and believable vernacular is, I would imagine, very challenging — capturing the Read More
Reading “Catcher”
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into Read More
