The Misread City

DAVID Foster Wallace's life was brilliant, tormented, and short -- cut off by a 2008 suicide. Because your humble blogger was going thro...

THE new issue of MOJO magazine has a cover story on the 25th anniversary of the Smiths' The Queen is Dead LP, an article on the 20th o...

If there's a more inventive, most linguistically alive mid-career writer than David Mitchell, I've not read him. Best known as the a...

Novelist Jonathan Lethem, though firmly associated with New York bohemia and a kind of Brooklyn renaissance, will be coming to Pomona Colleg...

On Saturday I led a panel at UCLA with three writers who work in what we might call slipstream, literary fantasy, conceptual fiction, surrea...

OKAY, okay, I'll admit it's a bit corny to post on verse during National Poetry Month, but I couldn't resist. I turned to some d...

THIS Saturday I am quite honored to be moderating a panel with three very fine novelists of my generation at the LA Times Festival of Books....

Pavement, arguably the finest indie-rock band of the '90s, has reunited for a spring and summer tour: I saw a very focussed and often wo...

I've been hearing about the legendary Lorin Stein -- a hip young editor at Farrar Straus and Giroux, probably the coolest of the major h...

Since he is widely considered the finest rock musician on any instrument, it's hard to be surprised that Jimi Hendrix won my guitar...

FOR years before I met him, I knew of Richard Rushfield as this dark legend -- a nihilist wit who ran an underground humor magazine, an onli...

IT'S the kind of phrase, however memorable, that the speaker probably wishes he could take back. when francis fukuyama responded to the ...

ONE of the key impulses of my generation -- what we used to call generation x -- has been the move away from old-school psychological realis...