“I hate to read new books.” —William Hazlitt, “On Reading Old Books” I am really not much of a rereader. I envy people who are, but it’s not in my blood. Over the past twelve months, I’ve rarely picked up a book for rereading for any reason other than professional
First, just let the product specifications sink in: Marilyn Monroe (Taschen), by Norman Mailer and Bert Stern, costs a thousand dollars. It pairs ninety-three thousand words Mailer wrote about Monroe in 1973 with more than a hundred shots from Stern’s 1962 four-day photo session with the doomed
Among the many sources of humiliation I either learned about or was forced to relive while reading Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation (Picador, $14): having a tiny penis or any form of smallness, soiling oneself or virtually any other physical process, writing or being written about, being jealous,
Lawn-mower haircuts and J. C. Penney polos are to Glenn O’Brien what Haiti is to Sean Penn. They provoke in him a kind of heroic passion that makes him want to save untold thousands from fashion disaster, or at least from the creeping sadness of the Gap. O’Brien has been a downtown Zelig for
More than forty years after its initial release, Donald Cammell's lurid film continues to haunt.
One of the things I've always noticed about movies about writers is that nobody knows what writing actually looks like. Usually the author is shown failing to write, balling up pieces of paper and throwing them in the wastebasket. I remember a movie about Lillian Hellman where she actually threw her
For a certain swath of American female thirty-somethings, the literary thriller comes with an odd set of associations. In addition to the windswept heaths of Wuthering Heights and Manderley, such books will likely conjure the pine-lined hiking trails of New Mexico, the fiercely policed social boundaries
Dear Bob Dylan, I hope this finds you well. You don't know me. My name is Rhett Miller. I make albums as a solo artist and as the front man for a band called Old 97's. I am like you, at least in that I've dedicated my postadolescent life to writing songs and singing them for folks. I write you now
In 1922, the German mark was shedding value so fast that anyone who visited the country holding a stable foreign currency could live like a kaiser. Ernest Hemingway crossed from France into the German town of Kehl and saw that economics was not wasted on the young. Students had figured out that their
"To be Prada is to be perfect in every way," reads one of the few examples of actual prose in Prada (Abrams, $125), the luxury-goods company's latest and largest coffee-table book. It's an image-heavy tome about image, and words are relegated to captions. The form makes clear what no corporate-authorized
