Paperback Writers: An Archive of Past Reviews
October 4, 2009
PAPERBACK WRITERS
New in paperback: Huxley's demons and the grace of Hanif Kureishi
Aldous Huxley: "The Devils of Loudun" (HarperPerennial)
September 13, 2009
PAPERBACK WRITERS
Paperback Writers: A view from the 'Heights'
Emily Brontë died in 1848, aged 30, leaving only one published book and some poems. That book, of course, is "Wuthering Heights" (recently issued in new editions, by Penguin and HarperCollins), a novel so strange and powerful that it sinks into the reader's DNA.
August 16, 2009
Nathanael West and the writing of 'The Day of the Locust'
The year 1939, when Europe was going up in flames and America clung to the hope that it need not become part of a world at war, turned out to be a miracle moment for Los Angeles fiction, seeing the publication of "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler, John Fante's "Ask The Dust," and "The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West (the latter just reissued in a new edition, along with "Miss Lonelyhearts," by New Directions, $11.95), three books that distilled distinctly and in very different ways the city that was being written about, and have continued to dictate how Los Angeles is perceived today.
July 19, 2009
PAPERBACKS
'In Such Hard Times' by Red Pine/Bill Porter
"On this day of drink and depression / I think about life on our Tuling farm / where will I be on the Ninth of next year / in such hard times I can't hope to go home," wrote the poet Wei Ying-Wu in the year 756 AD. At the time he was only about 20, and his world was crashing down.
June 21, 2009
PAPERBACK WRITERS
Welcome to Banham's Los Angeles
In the late 1960s, a tall and ungainly Englishman named Peter Reyner Banham brought his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion. It helped that, as a visiting architecture professor (Banham was teaching at USC), he was given some pretty fancy digs: He stayed in Greene & Greene's Gamble house in Pasadena, one of the most beautiful and romantic houses in America. So Banham had a privileged base from which to explore. But what he went looking for, and the way he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the way the intellectual world -- and then the wider world -- perceived the city. Reyner's " Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" -- first published in 1971 -- has now been reissued in a new edition with an excellent introduction by architect and scholar Joe Day (University of California Press: 296 pp., $22.95).
June 21, 2009
NEW IN PAPERBACK
Nerds, private eyes and others
Stephen Crane: "An Experiment in Misery" (HarperPerennial)
May 24, 2009
PAPERBACK WRITERS
Tricks with a knife
"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" was first published by a small press in the 1970s when its author, Michael Ondaatje, was still in his 20s and two decades away from the success and fame that would arrive with "The English Patient." Yet this early work already shows a door opening into the future; indeed, it might be argued that here, in his meditation on the legendary American outlaw, Ondaatje was already assembling the key tools in his writer's bag.
April 26, 2009
PAPERBACK WRITERS
Duke Elric: A cross between Conan and Camus
Maybe it's the books we read when we're young that stick with us the longest. That's the time when books not only excite us, but seem to tell us about ourselves and our futures. As a teenager I read (wallowed in and feasted upon, really) Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, "Great Expectations" and "David Copperfield," "Crime and Punishment," "The Great Gatsby," P.G. Wodehouse and Kafka. A predictably unstructured and non-academic bag, I guess. I also read, with mounting glee, and seized from different corners of the bookstore when my mother wasn't watching, the paperbacks of Michael Moorcock, especially those concerning the doomed prince Elric.
March 29, 2009
PAPERBACK WRITERS
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 of Salman Rushdie and David Foster Wallace, on the one hand, and the differently stylized realisms of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro on the other. A chapter from one of White's novels, submitted pseudonymously to a list of top publishers in 2007, was rejected by every one of them. White -- who was gay, had a gallows wit and self-consciously cast himself as an outsider, both ahead of his times and behind them -- would have seen the humor in that. He once said that he had wasted his life writing and should have stuck to "learning to cook properly."
March 1, 2009
PAPERBACK WRITERS
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," a series of fictions framed as memoir, or maybe they're just fictionalized memoir, bits of life seen in a dizzying metafictional mirror. Reading these books and trying to figure out where Kraft stops and Leroy begins is part of the mystery here, and part of the fun.
March 1, 2009
NEW IN PAPERBACK
New in paperback: Richard Yates, Denis Johnson, Charles Baxter and more
Barry Day (ed): "The Letters of Noel Coward" (Vintage)
January 4, 2009
New in paperback
New in paperback: : Getting personal
"The Journals of John Cheever" edited by Robert Gottlieb (Vintage)
January 4, 2009
PAPERBACK WRITERS
'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. Humboldt was just what everyone had been waiting for. Out in the Midwest I had certainly been waiting eagerly, I can tell you that," the book begins.
December 7, 2008
PAPERBACK WRITERS
A life runs backward
F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which forms the basis for the new David Fincher movie starring Brad Pitt, originally appeared in Collier's on May 27, 1922 (earlier the story had been rejected by Metropolitan), and was then featured in Fitzgerald's second story collection, "Tales of the Jazz Age."
November 9, 2008
PAPERBACK WRITERS
'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. Viewed in hindsight, though, "Pittsburgh" belongs to a more familiar category. It's a coming-of-age story, and a classic in that genre, the chronicle of a single summer, a structure that Chabon, always eager to flaunt his influences rather than show any anxiety about them, borrowed, lifted (whatever), from "The Great Gatsby."
November 9, 2008
NEW IN PAPERBACK
Reasons to shiver: New in paperback
"The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III" edited by Philip Gourevitch (Picador)
October 12, 2008
NEW IN PAPERBACK
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)
October 12, 2008
PAPERBACK WRITERS
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), but I wanted you and Kin to know the case is over and my book is coming out next January. Perry and Dick were executed last Tuesday. I was there because they wanted me to be. It was a terrible experience. Something I will never really get over."
August 17, 2008
PAPERBACK WRITERS
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. Kees had often spoken of killing himself and had once planned, with James Agee, to write a book on famous suicides; together they came up with a wonderful title, "How-Not-To-and-Why-Not-To-Do-It," though the project came to nothing. Both men were too busy plotting their own deaths.
July 20, 2008
PAPERBACK WRITERS
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":
June 22, 2008
Paperback writers
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. This crucial experience led to fiction, and to his first novel, "Hungry Men" (University of Oklahoma Press, currently out of print, but with plenty of copies available on Amazon), which in 1933 caused the Saturday Review of Literature to pronounce him the heir to Hemingway and Faulkner.
May 25, 2008
Paperback Writers
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." There's much more to Runyon than Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra looking sharp and talking cute in the 1955 film version of "Guys and Dolls."
July 22, 2007
Paperback writers
His own brand
Almost 50 years ago, in 1959, Philip Roth published "Goodbye, Columbus," a coming-of-age love story that was short, sharp, tender and pitch-perfect, and won the National Book Award. Few writers have launched a career so auspiciously. Roth, of course, went on to win pretty much every other literary prize going, achieving almost uncontrollable celebrity with his 1969 novel "Portnoy's Complaint." Here, obviously, was a big career.
January 6, 2008
PAPERBACK WRITERS
The magical and the elemental, from Halldór Laxness
By Richard Rayner
December 9, 2007
PAPERBACK WRITERS
Aging gracefully: Ken Kesey's "Cuckoo" and "Notion"
By Richard Rayner
November 11, 2007
PAPERBACK WRITERS
Unexpected affinities
Careers have arcs. Writers develop and change, as evidenced by "I Explain a Few Things: Selected Poems" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 360 pp., $16), a new bilingual anthology of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" (Vintage: 384 pp., $14.95), a collection of 24 stories spanning more than two decades by Haruki Murakami. Neruda died in 1973 at 69, while Murakami, approaching 60, is happily very much still with us.
PAPERBACK WRITERS
Resurrecting Derek Raymond, a.k.a. the first Robin Cook
Robin Cook, the first Robin Cook (not the guy who writes bestselling medical thrillers), was born in London in 1931 and died there 63 years later, suggesting an order otherwise absent in a chaotic and almost dottily brave life. Cook, married five times, was the son of a millionaire British textile magnate, born with the silver spoon and all that. He went to school at Eton, "the assembly line for rulers and bastards" (as he called it). Then, rather than proceed to Oxbridge or the army, he rebelled against his background, drifting into a world of petty, and sometimes not so petty, crime — his affable manners and toff accent were useful in ways that he hadn't expected. He was an excellent con man.
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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