Critical Mass

1. The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. GrantLCRW is one of my favorite literary magazines, featuring authors like Jeffrey Ford and Nalo

A confession: This summer, when I could have been reading forward, I read backward. That is to say, while many if not most of my book critic colleagues were focusing

Three moves and a two-month trip in under one calendar year mean all my favorite books have been in storage for 9 months–but my shelves are lined with shiny (or

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz     In 1996 a young Dominican-American writer named Junot Díaz published a slender book of short stories called

It's hard to judge how many writers have been displaced, dislocated and disoriented by Katrina and aftermath. This is part of a series I started a year ago with a

1) Recently published and terrific: John Gallaher’s THE LITTLE BOOK OF GUESSES (Four Way, 2007). Critics want to compare Gallaher to Ashbery and, well, I can see their point. But there’s so much more to

Earlier this week, Joyce Johnson wrote about her time with Kerouac in Vanity Fair.  You can buy her memoir, Minor Characters, at Powells for 20 percent off right now.  You can get read

1) The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Riverhead, Sept.)I'm completely over the moon for this novel, which Díaz fans have waited for ever since the 1996

Every once in a while I’m asked whether I miss “reading for fun.” Meaning, do I miss reading a book for the sheer pleasure of it, without the looming obligation