I went to see Maurice Sendak last year at his home in Connecticut. The eighty-three-year-old was promoting his latest book, Bumble-Ardy, about an orphaned pig whose ninth-birthday festivities are gate-crashed by teenage swine. He came to the door with his dog, Herman (after Melville), and for the next two hours was everything one might expect […]
“Shall we sit outside?” Mario Vargas Llosa asked me, gesturing through the library’s floor-to-ceiling windows at the brilliant September afternoon. The only Peruvian ever to have won a Nobel Prize, Vargas Llosa now lives in an eight-bedroom mansion on the fringes of Madrid, in the neighborhood known as Puerta de Hierro. When I arrived, a […]
FERLINGHETTI’S GREATEST POEMS By Lawrence Ferlinghetti Edited by Nancy J. Peters. 144 pp. New Directions. $16.95. ONE DAY WHEN I was about 14 or 15 and wandering the aisles of a bookstore in Southern California, my eyes were drawn to “Endless Life,” a collection of poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I grew up in a conservative […]
“There is no such thing as a succès d’estime in America. That’s why it is a French phrase.” Tina Brown never lacked for success in the American fame-and-money sense of the word. Yet for all the acclaim that has come the way of this legendary magazine editor, Brown has also been persistently underestimated. Brown observes […]
There’s a moment in Mort Walker’s “Beetle Bailey,” from decades ago, when the innocent Zero asks the intellectual Plato why he owns so many books. Plato explains proudly that “all the wisdom of the ages” can be found between their covers. Zero responds, “What happens if a couple of pages get stuck together?” Mort’s own […]
A curious security guard at a venerable Manhattan office building near Columbus Circle inquired what sort of work the man I was visiting did—was he a lawyer? “No,” I answered. “Robert Caro is an author. He writes books.” He certainly does. Caro has won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards. When the Society of American Historians […]
“Mary Oliver is saving my life,” Paul Chowder, the title character of Nicholson Baker’s novel “The Anthologist,” scrawls in the margins of Oliver’s “New and Selected Poems, Volume One.” A struggling poet, Chowder is suffering from a severe case of writer’s block. His girlfriend, with whom he’s lived for eight years, has just left him, […]
PARIS — Philip Roth has never lived in France, reads French literature only in translation and has never set a novel in Paris, the cliched province of the lonely urban saunterer and existential ennui. To say the least, the French do not seem to mind. This month, the aging titan of American letters won one […]
I blame my flickering attention, but I have always gone as gaga for isolated sentences as for whole books. One favorite begins an essay that I’ve read 20-odd times over 30-plus years, and it’s this: “Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when […]
On one of my first meetings with Philip Pullman, he led me to the crenelated tower of Exeter College, in Oxford, and pointed out the room he lived in as a student. More than 50 feet up from the ground was a tiny attic window. To visit friends living in rooms on the adjacent staircase […]
In 1951, Sylvia Plath signed off on a letter to her mother: “The only quiet woman is a dead one.” Was anyone ever so wrong? Twelve years later, Plath would kill herself in her London flat on a winter morning, while her small children slept in the next room and her husband was off with […]
With the year more than half way through, we at Book Marks thought we’d take a look back at the titles that garnered the strongest reviews since January 1st. Whether your poison is historical fiction, family memoir, short stories, investigative journalism, graphic non fiction, biography, or sci-fi, this list has something for you. 1.Lincoln in […]
