Is 48fps enough to bring Tolkien back to the big screen? Or is imagination more important?
I put forth the modest proposition that a movie containing this much paralogia should be rejected by a mass audience. Why the new Spider-Man movie is a drag.
An essay on Tim Burton’s disastrous reimagining of Dark Shadows and the lessons he has failed to learn from the original series.
A review written in 20 minutes shortly after reading Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee’s anthology, The Late American Novel.
I don’t confess nearly as much as Tom Bissell in my review of his excellent book, Extra Lives. But I do nevertheless come out to…
My review of Lionel Shriver’s novel, So Much for That, runs in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. Here’s the first paragraph: In We Need to Talk About…
In today’s Philly Inquirer, you’ll find my review of Donald E. Westlake’s Memory, published by Hard Case Crime. Here’s the first few paragraphs: The celebrated…
My review of Gail Godwin’s Unfinished Desires appears in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. Here’s the first paragraph: Over the past half-century, the extreme religious right, as…
I’ve interviewed the extremely entertaining writer Charlie Huston twice now for The Bat Segundo Show: once in 2007, where Huston rather devilishly attempted (and failed)…
The latest issue of h+ has been released, and there’s loads of good stuff: an interview with Ray Kurzweil, Andrew Hessel discussing the formation of…
In all the NYFF madness, I failed to note that my review of Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Darkappeared in Friday’s edition of the Chicago…
In today’s Barnes & Noble Review, I take on Nicholas Meyer’s The View from the Bridge. Meyer is best known as the man behind Star…
My review of Chuck Barris’s Who Killed Art Deco? appears in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. And truthfully, the review is far crankier than I remember it…
In today’s Chicago Sun-Times, you can find my review of Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier. And it’s rather fitting that much of my…
Chuck Palahniuk is regularly dismissed by the snobs. Despite his sales, you will not see a New York Review of Books or a Bookforum essay…
In today’s Barnes and Noble Review, you can find my piece on Nancy Kress’s Steal Across the Sky. The first sentence — what some folks…
In today’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, you can find my review of Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger. Waters appeared on The Bat Segundo Show…
Two pieces have been recently cajoled out of me. Chris Robbins recently acquired the domain, embarrassing.com, through some legerdemain that I won’t inquire about. (It…
In today’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, you will find my review of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. Let it be known that I did…
The book appears to have been completely ignored by American newspapers. There’s this snobbish Bookforum review which observes “lowbrow thrills” and appears written by a…
My review of G. Xavier Robillard’s Captain Freedom appears in today’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, along with many other interesting pieces, including Mark Athitakis’s…
I’ve had a quiet obsession with the Panama Canal for a while. Now another book has come along — Julie Greene’s The Canal Builders —…
There’s a lot of fresh content that will be unloaded onto these pages over the course of the day, including three podcasts and a film…
A new issue of h+ Magazine has left the building. The quarterly magazine, edited by the incomparable R.U. Sirius, features contributions from the likes of…
Well, the Gerald Celente post continues to draw plenty of haters to this site. And that’s fine. Because everybody needs a hobby. But I’m pleased…
Deadlines and line dancing which pertains to deadlines will keep me occupied for the better part of today. So pardon the silence while I clack…
Pardon the sparse updates. It’s been busy on this front, but more long-form content is coming. There will also be some more podcasts. In the…
My review of Tony Vigorito’s Nine Kinds of Naked appears in this morning’s Chicago Sun-Times. I’m particularly excited about this review, because I somehow managed…
The Thomas Nelson affair (not to be confused with The Thomas Crown Affair) sent a considerable tizzy through the Twittersphere last week. I’ve written about…
One of my projects over the past few months was reading somewhere in the area of sixteen books (along with a good deal of beginnings)…