Category Archives: Books

Novelists and cable television

[The New York Times] In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’ve got an essay about how more and more novelists are selling the rights to their work to cable networks — and in many cases, even helping adapt that work, … Continue reading

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A Review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead: Essays

[San Francisco Chronicle] In yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, I’ve got a review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s terrific new book. It collects a bunch of Sullivan’s magazine pieces (hence its title, Pulphead), and pretty much all of them, whether a review or … Continue reading

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Wouldn’t it be great if the book industry had its own Oscars?

[The New York Times] In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’ve got an essay on the short and inglorious history of the American Book Awards. Actually, it’s also a history of the short and inglorious rebranding of the National … Continue reading

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“I was always slightly less Foucauldian than I sounded”: A profile of Stephen Greenblatt

[The Boston Globe] In Sunday’s Boston Globe, in the Ideas section, I’ve got a profile of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt. In his new book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Greenblatt writes about the fifteenth century’s rediscovery of Lucretius and … Continue reading

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Christmas is only three months away!

For their December 1990 issue, the editors of The American Spectator did the same thing they’d done every year since 1976: they asked a few famous writers, academics, and political types to provide book recommendations for the holiday shopping season. … Continue reading

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