Tag Archives: Literature and Fiction

Though his New Yorkers live somewhat dreamy lives, Rinaldi’s New York is not a modern-day version of Mark Helprin’s from A Winter’s Tale (though Echo Terrace’s rooftop Independence Day party bears a distant relation to Helprin’s images of TB victims lying on rooftops all over Manhattan). It’s not even Woody Allen’s. It’s the real thing.

Given all the chatter about art and museums, it is only fitting that we turn our noses in the direction of the Perfume Museum of Barcelona. In the words of founder Ramon Planas Buera: The Perfume Museum of Barcelona, installed in the Paseo de Gracia 39, it was inaugurated in …

Oprah Windfall’s book club is back – now she is focusing on classics to turn into instant bestsellers: Oprah Winfrey (news) was sitting under an oak tree in California last summer, reading John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” and loving it, when she realized that just telling a few friends about …

PW Daily newsletter announces The Caprices by Sabina Murray (Mariner) as the winner of the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. From the nomination site: Judges have selected five books published in 2002 as finalists for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America’s largest peer-juried prize for fiction. The nominees are …

Half Mast, the first novel from FilmCritic.com founder Christopher Null, is a stunning accomplishment, achieving several difficult tasks simultaneously: gripping caper yarn, perceptive coming of age story, keen observation and commentary on drastic Darwinian social stratification in school (with echoes of Columbine, et al), and a devastating look at the …

Spain's graphic adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's dark carny classic.

Via Glenn-omir, grim tidings from the Return of the King film front: why buy into EITHER the Star Wars OR the Lord of the Rings universe when you can have both? A recently leaked trailer for The Return of the King has Tolkien fans outraged over the apparent addition of …

The most recent Comics Journal (#248) has a sharp column by R.C. Harvey on Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel about the early years of the comic book industry, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Picador USA). In it, comics scholar Harvey basically fact-checks Chabon’s book – which focuses on the …

For this year’s National Book Awards nominations and bios, please see here and here. The Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters this year will go to Philip Roth, one of America’s most acclaimed and inventive authors, whose prolific publishing history over six decades has achieved both best-seller status and …

I love A Confederacy of Dunces, one of the funniest, most empathetic looks at misfits and outsiders ever written, that blessedly never dips into sentimentality. Ignatius P. Reilly is a vexing, troubling, brilliant character who represents the late author’s alter ego, ultimately triumphant. The dialogue is brilliant and dead real …