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... )

From Friday, 9 March to Saturday, 10 March, I read Lynn Barber's memoir, An Education (NY: Atlas & Co. Publishers [distributed by W.W. Norton & Company], 2009 [first published in the UK by the Penguin Group]; 173 pps.); this was an expansion of the article she'd had published in Granta, which was the basis of the eponymous 2009 film (which I've yet ( Read more... )

I recently bought (on Wednesday, 21 February) the Barnes & Noble omnibus edition of Peter Gethers' The Norton Trilogy, which is a series of snarkily humorous memoirs about the author's travels with his Scottish Fold cat, Norton. (The trilogy consists of: The Cat Who Went to Paris, 1991, 194 pps.; A Cat Abroad, 1993, 243 pps.; and The Cat Who'll ( Read more... )