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There are certain books that all young artists read. For example, the other night I met a young woman at a bar. She said she was a cartoonist, so I asked to see her studio. Going over the next night, I noticed on her shelves a book I cherished when I was eighteen: Salvador Dalí’s Diary of a Genius.
In Preston Sturges’s film Sullivan’s Travels (1941), convicts get a break from the woes of the Depression and chain-gang life at a screening of the Walt Disney cartoon “Playful Pluto.” Now, just in time for the current economic crisis, comes Disney’s first traditional animated feature in five
Like any large city, London is a place of subcultures, most of which don’t find a place in mainstream lives or in mainstream writing. Here are some books that describe various forgotten London undergrounds. Mind the gaps . . .
While there are countless autobiographies by writers who have lost their sanity, memoirs of schizophrenia are a rarer breed. In moments of florid psychosis, schizophrenics can become so self-conscious about how they use words that they lose the ability to communicate. Everyday phrases seem unfamiliar,
Nabokov urged us to read with our spines, to savor the tingle that the best writing brings. I tell the students in my comic-novel seminar to read with their funny bones. (Unfortunately, my suggestion that they mark the first point at which they chuckled audibly led to a paralyzing, nearly class-wide
The spread of Bolañomania last year, after the release of 2666, was amazing to witness. I never thought I’d see a complex and disturbing nine-hundred-page novel, translated from Spanish and written by an author who passed away a few years ago, show up on the New York Times best-seller list. As a
Long before Amazon.com reviewers tyrannically demanded sympathetic and likable protagonists, literature was reliably populated by leading men of a less bland stripe. It’s hard for me to understand why someone would want to spend their reading hours in the company of the virtuous, the accomplished,
The Peregrine by J. A. Baker: While Sebald’s nature walks are ultimately encounters with human culture, Baker’s immersion in the life of the peregrines of East Anglia documents his attempt to efface the human. Near the beginning of The Peregrine, he writes that he has “always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out
Submitted for your approval, a list (in reverse chronological order) of exemplary books that treat the otherworldly—ghosts, monsters, other fantastic phenomena—as truth. That last word needs qualifying: Most of these writers belie their documentary pretenses by embellishing reality or simply by
Emily Dickinson’s legendary silence has produced a discordant chorus of speculation and mythmaking. As Alfred Habegger, her best biographer, has written, Dickinson’s “reclusiveness, originality of mind, and unwillingness to print her work [have] left just the sort of informational gaps that
