First we had Gore Vidal's not-unexpected passing last Tuesday, 31 July.

Then we learned of the death, on Thursday, 2 August, of Sir John Keegan, certainly one of, if not the, preeminent military historians of the late 20th century, and one noted for the attention that he paid to the psychological effects of war upon men in works such as 1976's ( Read more... )

Gore Vidal died on Tuesday, 31 July at the age of 86 due complications from pneumonia; the Internet pretty much blossomed on Wednesday, 1 August, with remembrances and "good riddances", which trickled to a stop by Friday, 3 August (or, in some quarters, Sunday, 5 August ( Read more... )

Dwight Garner had a nice overview of tough-guy Southern novelist Harry Crews in yesterday's (Thursday, 29 March) "ArtsBeat" blog on the New York Times's website ("Reading Crews, a Novelist as Swaggering as His Characters"); Crews passed away on Wednesday, 28 March, at the age of 76.

(SIDEBAR: the NY Times will restrict non-subscribers to ten ( Read more... )

The full page ad in the front of the April issue of Harper's reminded me of another recent addition to my list of booklusts.

The formidable Michiko Kakutani gave the latest novel of Edward St. Aubyn, At Last (published in 2011 in the UK, but published in the U.S. this year) -- which the author at present says is the fifth and concluding ( Read more... )

The latest issue of Harper's Magazine (the April 2012 issue: Vol. 324, No. 1943) hit my mailbox yesterday, and, as usual, the first articles I turned to were the book reviews: Larry McMurtry's "New Books" column, which he inherited from Zadie Smith (White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty), and which serves as a continual reproach that I've not ( Read more... )

Yesterday, the first thing that leaped out at me from the Google News feed on my computer at work was the hardly unexpected, but no less devastating, word of the passing, on Thursday night (15 December) of British-American professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, book critic, public intellectual, public gadfly), from ( Read more... )

This past Sunday's (19 July 2009) New York Times Magazine had a long-ish (6 pps. when printed out from teh interwebs) article on one of my favorite authors, Jack VanceI've read somewhere between 16 and 18 of his books; all of his books that I've read are in storage, and I haven't read anything else by him in at least four years, probably more like ( Read more... )

BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme -- an arts programme aired Mondays through Fridays from 1915 to 1945 GMT (that's 1515 to 1545 EDT) -- had a ten minute interview with Gore Vidal in its Friday, 23 May episode; the occasion was a rare (these days...) visit to London by Vidal and the recent publication in paperback in the UK of his latest (and, if ( Read more... )

On Monday, 18 December, the second hour of On Point, a syndicated National Public Radio programme originated at WBUR-FM in Boston, was devoted to the notoriously reclusive (and notoriously "difficult") author Thomas Pynchon, focusing in particular on his latest novel, the 1100-paged Against the Day, which is set before and during World War I ( Read more... )

Jack Williamson, who was the second Grand Master anointed by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFoA: they're the folks who hand out the Nebula Awards), died in his home in Portales, New Mexico last Friday, 10 November. He was 98 years old, and still taught an English class (apparently one specializing in science fiction) at Eastern New ( Read more... )