Reading
Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve by Sandra M. Gilbert. W.W. Norton, 2006; $29.95; 580 pages FROM THE DUST JACKET: Prominent critic, poet, and memoirist Sandra M. Gilbert explores our relationship to …
American Movie Critics: From the Silents Until Now, edited by Phillip Lopate. Library of America, 2006; $40; 700 pages FROM THE DUST JACKET: American Movie Critics is an anthology of unparalleled scope that charts the …
A Primitive Heart: Stories by David Rabe. Grove Press, 2005; $24; 287 pages FROM THE DUST JACKET: David Rabe is one of the finest playwrights in America, possessed of a muscular voice, singular gift for …
My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood by Christine Rosen. PublicAffairs, 2005; $24; 231 pages FROM THE DUST JACKET: A touching, funny memoir of growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, in a household, …
CALIFORNIA'S POET LAUREATE Al Young, California's newest poet laureate, and I were talking. I asked if he recalled the first poem he ever read. "That's interesting. I have to go all the way back to …
Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir by Kate Braverman. Graywolf Press, 2006; 218 pages; $15 FROM THE DUST JACKET: Kate Braverman grew up in Los Angeles in the late 1950s at …
Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006; $23; 240 pages. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Deborah Eisenberg is nearly unmatched in her mastery of the short-story form. Now, in her …
The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster. Henry Holt & Co., 2005; $24; 306 pages FROM THE DUST JACKET: Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life …
The Bill from My Father: A Memoir by Bernard Cooper. Simon & Schuster, 2006; 240 pages; $24 FROM THE DUST JACKET: Bernard Cooper's new memoir is searing, soulful, and filled with uncommon psychological nuance and …
Crushed by Laura and Tom McNeal. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006; $15.95; 308 pages FROM THE DUST JACKET: The acclaimed authors of Crooked and Zippedbring their signature suspense and razor-sharp dialogue to this compelling new novel …
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006; $28; 340 pages. FROM THE DUST JACKET: The dust storms that terrorized …
The Letters of Lytton Strachey edited by Paul Levy. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005, 720 pages; $40 FROM THE DUST JACKET: Lytton Strachey is one of the key figures in the cultural life of the …
A few years ago I ran across Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country. The novel's translator writes in an introduction to the novel: The west coast of the main island of Japan is probably for its latitude …
What I don't like about where I live is that snow never falls. I saw a glass ball that has a snowman in it. You shake the globe and "snow" falls. I bought it. I …
Billy Collins Live: A Performance at the Peter Norton Symphony Space. Random House Audio, 2005; $19.95 The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems by Billy Collins. Random House, 2005; $22.95; 112 pages FROM THE DUST …
The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation's Greatest Magazine. Introduction by David Remnick. Random House, 2005; eight DVD-ROMs enclosed in a 123-page booklet, $100 FROM THE DUST JACKET: Every page of every issue …