He wasn’t just prolific, publishing 32 books. His output also showed an unusual range that included memoirs and forays into historical fiction and even poetry. Read more
Tag: American Authors
Barry N. Malzberg Dies at 85
The key fact about Malzberg was not just that he was fast—but that he was good. Perfectly readable was his baseline minimum, and when he was at his peak, he overshot that to achieve genuine brilliance. It’s easy enough to tote up evidence of Malzberg’s prolificity: In his peak decade, from 1967 to 1976, Malzberg wrote at least 68 novels and seven story collections along with scores of still uncollected stories published in many magazines and anthologies. He worked in a variety of genres, including mystery, thrillers, erotica, and adventure fiction, but his core work was in science fiction. Malzberg’s best science fiction novels—titles such as Beyond Apollo (1972), Herovit’s World (1973), Guernica Night (1975), and Galaxies (1975)—were astonishingly incisive critiques of modern technology and mass society. Intimately familiar with the genre, Malzberg used all the familiar SF tropes (space exploration, time travel, alternative histories) but amped them up with a bracing dose of pessimism and the stylistic bravura of literary modernism. Read more
The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers
Charles Fort (1874–1932), the progenitor of modern supernatural studies, rattled the “iron cage of rationality” in the early 20th century, according to this enthralling account. Buhs (Bigfoot) argues that Fort’s unique brand of science-mysticism—he was best known for collecting and compiling newspaper clippings of inexplicable events and for promoting paranormal research—influenced several divergent but interlocking branches of art, politics, and culture. During Fort’s lifetime, his writings on metaphysics inspired avant-gardists and modernists—including Henry Miller and Ezra Pound—who adopted many of his habits of thought, according to Buhs, especially his skepticism of science, penchant for mythmaking, and search for hidden truths. After his death, his legacy fell to two acolytes who founded the Fortean Society: adman Tiffany Thayer and science fiction writer Eric Frank Russell. Buhs traces how, as Fort’s thinking grew ever more influential in the 1950s, inspiring both the golden age of sci-fi and UFO-mania, Thayer and Russell led Fortean thought in a less playful, more paranoid direction; they came to believe that the government was covering up the existence of the supernatural, helping to give birth to America’s robust conspiracy theory subculture. Buhs’s erudite narrative is jam-packed with minor and major 20th-century figures who he shows were influenced by Fort. The result is a lively alternative history of modernity. Read more
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Barbara Taylor Bradford, Whose Sagas Were Best Sellers, Dies at 91
Her own rags-to-riches story mirrored those of many of her resilient heroines, and her dozens of novels helped her amass a fortune of $300 million. Read more
Dorothy Allison, Author of ‘Bastard Out of Carolina,’ Dies at 75
Dorothy Allison, who wrote with lyrical, pungent wit about her working-class Southern upbringing — and about the incest and violence that shaped her — and whose acclaimed 1992 novel, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” based on her harrowing childhood, made her a literary star, died on Tuesday at her home in Guerneville, Calif., in Sonoma County. Read more
Gary Indiana, Acerbic Cultural Critic and Novelist, Dies at 74
Gary Indiana, the elfin novelist, cultural critic, playwright and artist whose crackling prose and lacerating wit captured the ravages of the AIDS crisis, Manhattan’s downtown art scene, lurid true crimes and his own search for love, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. Read more
Robert Coover, Inventive Novelist in Iconoclastic Era, Dies at 92
Robert Coover, who along with Donald Barthelme, John Barth and others occupied the vanguard of postmodern American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and who went on to a long and prolific career writing and teaching, died on Saturday in Warwick, England. Read more
Where To Start With Truman Capote
Today marks 100 years since the birth of Truman Capote, the author of quietly devastating novels, charming short stories, and pioneering works of creative nonfiction. Read more
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Nelson DeMille, Blockbuster Author Who Thrilled Millions, Dies at 81
Nelson DeMille, a beloved and prolific author whose propulsive thrillers featuring terrorist hijackings, Russian spy schools, gruesome murders, Mafia kingpins, wartime crimes and military malfeasance made him a publishing juggernaut, died on Tuesday in Mineola, N.Y. Read more
Lewis H. Lapham, Harper’s Editor and Piercing Columnist, Dies at 89
Lewis H. Lapham, the scholarly patrician who edited Harper’s Magazine for nearly three decades, and who in columns, books and later his own magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, attacked what he regarded as the inequities and hypocrisies of American life, died on Tuesday in Rome. Read more
