His fascination with terrorism, cults and mass culture’s weirder turns has given his work a prophetic air. Here’s where to start. Read more
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Tag: American Authors
Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77
Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77. Read more
The Essential Joan Didion
Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma. Read more
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John Barth, Writer Who Pushed Storytelling’s Limits, Dies at 93
Mr. Barth was 30 when he published his sprawling third novel, the boisterous “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960). It projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers, drawing comparisons to contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. Read more
The Crime Novelist Who Was Also a Great American Novelist
Chester Himes was on par with Ellison, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, S.A. Cosby writes. Read more
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John Nichols, Literary Chronicler of Small-Town New Mexico, Dies at 83
John Nichols, who launched his literary career in his mid-20s with a pair of tragicomic novels but became best known for evoking New Mexico’s small towns and rural landscapes in books including “The Milagro Beanfield War,” was found dead Nov. 27 at his home in Taos, N.M. He was 83. Read more
The Essential Larry McMurtry
A wildly prolific son of Texas, McMurtry was a tangle of contradictions. Here’s where to start. Read more
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‘Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather’ by Benjamin Taylor
Slender, discerning … Should appeal to anyone — novice or expert — ready to explore Cather’s life and work in the company of a critic so alert to the shimmering subtlety of her style and the hard years of effort that went into crystallizing it … With great feeling and deeply informed perception, Taylor helps us readers realize anew the sustained effort it took for Cather to meet ‘the rest of herself,’ in her novels and her life. Read more
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Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89
Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of “The Road,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. Read more
The Oddballs and Odysseys of Charles Portis
Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country. Read more
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