We plunge into The Gunslinger, groping for a beginning On page one, we catch the story by the tail. The gunslinger, Roland, already carries his father’s weapons. They are heavy with bullets. We wonder whether they’ll unload into the man in black. So we’re off — already straining after the finale. And are we any …
Richard Osman has been both sides of the screen Long before he presented television, he watched it, nose smudging the glass. His rule? The closer the better. For when he was a couple of inches of the tube, the flickering reds and blacks took on elaborate life. They became The Dukes of Hazzard. Further back, …
When I dream of Hawaii, the waves are warm, turquoise, and reassuringly strong — nothing like the ‘small, dark-faced, windblown’ waves described by William Finnegan. Go ahead and trust him over my fantasies. I dream. He was there. His autobiography Barbarian Days begins with a boyhood on the islands. Then it moves like a swell …
I’ve been down a rabbit hole, learning about David Foster Wallace. And there’s a lot to sift through. The tennis… the footnotes… the depressive episodes and abusive relationships… the posthumous Pulitzer Prize… My research twisted in on itself. Facts were repeated, underscored. A Sunday afternoon drained away. I heard about Wallace as a good man …
Aliens crash in a cornfield and set out to conquer Earth… The aliens are petrifying in their strangeness… Humans resist with tanks and planes… That’s a typical sci-fi story — the kind you’d get in pulp magazines from the 1950s: Fantastic Science Fiction or Amazing Stories. Ursula K. Le Guin read those titles as a …
Hunter S. Thompson was not short of opinions. You could get him riffing on Nixon or disco or motorcycles or breakfast — anything, really. He’d gibber into a handheld recorder until the cassette stopped or the beer ran dry. That was his method: to observe close-up, with extreme prejudice. To fill the pages of Rolling …
Joan Didion could deal with hippies. She could deal with addicts and officers of the law. But she couldn’t deal with the deadline set by The Saturday Evening Post. The paper had partnered Didion with the photojournalist Ted Streshinsky – and sent the pair of them into Haight-Ashbury. Their assignment was to gather an impression …
Who is American cinema’s greatest hero? Indiana Jones… who thwarted Nazis? Ellen Ripley… who exploded an alien queen? Or a lawyer from Maycomb County in rural Alabama… who didn’t even win his case? I side with the American Film Institute in this debate: the top spot belongs to the attorney. The character of Atticus Finch …
Fitzgerald’s Latest A Dud When The Great Gatsby was published, it was panned. Fitzgerald — who had been hailed as a ‘young man of promise’ — was mauled for being ‘bored and tired and cynical’. Here’s the damning judgement of H.L. Mencken, critic at the Chicago Tribune: What ails [The Great Gatsby], fundamentally, is the …
That’s the voice of Demon Copperhead: titular character of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel. It’s a narrative voice that sticks like mud. Once you read it, you can’t shake it off. (Especially if you careen through all five-hundred-plus pages of Kingsolver’s book, like I did — unable to put it down.) Demon would be pleased with the …
