Recent posts about Authors & Books on Typepad

There is much strange in La Vita Nuova, the libello or “little book” that Dante composed fifteen or so years before starting in on the Divine Comedy. Take, for starters, the form of the book, an alternation of prose and... Read more

Under Fire Stop looking at me. I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t know the words to the song. That’s all. I wandered around the mall with my broken watch. I had all my receipts. But no one would take... Read more

Perusing the Poetry Atlas for Albuquerque poems. Read more

Life magazine, August 8, 1949. "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The artIcle that changed the art world. Merely by asking the question, Life made it a self-fulfilling prophecy, demonstrating the power of the... Read more

So many people in my various social media feeds are posting pictures of their gardens these days. I'm reminded of this poem, by James Tate, from his wonderful book Shroud of the Gnome. sdl The Definition of Gardening Jim just... Read more

When The Manchurian Candidate, based on the novel by Richard Condon, was released in 1962, Pauline Kael called it “the most sophisticated political satire ever to come out of Hollywood.” Six decades on, the judgment holds, and I’ll go further.... Read more

When Kirk Gibson hit perhaps the most unlikely home run in baseball history – when, hobbled with injuries, he pinch-hit with two out and a man on first base, and the Dodgers were one pitch away from losing the game,... Read more

My review for Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena first appeared in The Horror Zine. It is reposted here with permission. Editors Donald Armfield and Maxwell I. Gold have taken their book, Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena, very much... Read more

Columbia focused on World War II saboteurs with The Batman and The Secret Code serials. In The Batman, J. Carrol Naish played Dr. Daka, a Japanese mastermind, who, with his henchmen, tangled with the caped crusader. In The Secret Code,... Read more

Louis Begley writes well and is a good guide to one of modern history's great tragic causes celebres, the court-martial of French artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus [left] on trumped-up charges of treason in 1894. The evidence was fabricated, the trial... Read more