Welcome to Hecht’s Windy City
Ben Hecht used Oscars for doorstops and routinely heaped scorn on the studio pontiffs who, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, paid him an average of $3,500 a day. Before he co-wrote “The Front Page,” the play that brought him fame and opportunity, before he laid the story foundations of two basic movie genres…
The year’s best paperback reissues
In “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce” (Verso: 158 pp., $12.95), the philosopher and cultural-theorist Slavoj Zizek uses his razzle-dazzle postmodern intellect to probe the economic catastrophe of 2008. Capitalism is an ideology, Zizek argues, and the notion of a global free market was as utopian, and as potentially delusional, as communism.
“‘American Homicide’; ‘Women Who Kill'”
A couple of weeks ago in Venice, I was cycling back from the store and found 7th Avenue blocked by fire trucks and cop cars parked at crazy angles with their doors open and lights flashing. People thronged the sidewalk on the western side of the street, where an old woman was holding up four fingers, saying: “Four. I heard four shots.”
“‘Paperback Writers: Greek myth is hip, so is Richard Milward’s new novel”
This is weird, wild, wonderful. Dino Buzzati was a luminary of the Italian avant-garde around the middle of the last century. His writing started out as straightforward realism but moved toward Gogol and Kafka. Near the end of his life he created “Poem Strip,” a graphic novel that was way ahead of the curve…
‘The Humbling’ by Philip Roth
“He’d lost his magic,” begins Philip Roth’s elegant and brutal new novella, launching right into the downfall of its protagonist, Simon Axler, a celebrated sixtysomething actor. “Instead of the certainty that he was going to be wonderful, he knew he was going to fail.” Axler’s talent and instincts have deserted him without warning…
“‘The Vampire Archives,’ edited by Otto Penzler”
“You have heard, no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails in Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Serbia, in Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of the vampire,” wrote Sheridan Le Fanu in his classic “Carmilla,” first serialized in London in 1871 and 1872.
Paperback Writers: Slaughter and rubble
“The only way I can regain credit for my early work is to die,” Kurt Vonnegut once said, sounding more amused than worried about it. Ever the realist, ever the stoic, ever the cynic, Vonnegut got how the lit game works. Reputations soar, tumble into the trash and rise mysteriously again.
New in paperback: Huxley’s demons and the grace of Hanif Kureishi
Aldous Huxley: “The Devils of Loudun” (HarperPerennial)In 1643, an entire convent in the small French village of Loudun was apparently possessed by the devil. The convent’s charismatic priest was eventually convicted of seducing the nuns in his charge and being in league with Satan. Then he was burned at the stake.
“‘Blood’s a Rover: A Novel’ by James Ellroy”
Here’s the new James Ellroy. You pretty much know what you’re going to get. Bucketloads of conspiracy theory and 600-plus pages of stripped-down prose strafing you like a machine gun. The book is long, as usual, the sentences short, as ever: “He was a sergeant on the Vegas PD…
“‘Paperback Writers: A view from the ‘Heights'”
Emily Brontë died in 1848, aged 30, leaving only one published book and some poems. That book, of course, is “Wuthering Heights” (recently issued in new editions, by Penguin and HarperCollins), a novel so strange and powerful that it sinks into the reader’s DNA.”1801. I have just returned from a visit to my landlord — the solitary neighbor…
‘In Such Hard Times’ by Red Pine/Bill Porter
On this day of drink and depression / I think about life on our Tuling farm / where will I be on the Ninth of next year / in such hard times I can’t hope to go home,” wrote the poet Wei Ying-Wu in the year 756 AD. At the time he was only about 20, and his world was crashing down.
“Nerds, private eyes and others”
Stephen Crane: “An Experiment in Misery” (HarperPerennial)“The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a grey swampish hush.”
“Welcome to Banham’s Los Angeles”
In the late 1960s, a tall and ungainly Englishman named Peter Reyner Banham brought his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion. It helped that, as a visiting architecture professor (Banham was teaching at USC), he was given some pretty fancy digs…
“‘The Signal: A Novel’ by Ron Carlson”
Ron Carlson’s new novel is a love story and a wilderness adventure that mounts to a climax of shocking, and satisfying, violence. It’s a tale from the woods and it begins when Mack, a young Wyoming rancher who’s been messing himself up and has just gotten out of jail, arranges to meet his estranged wife…
“Tricks with a knife”
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” was first published by a small press in the 1970s when its author, Michael Ondaatje, was still in his 20s and two decades away from the success and fame that would arrive with “The English Patient.” Yet this early work already shows a door opening into the future…
“Sunnyside: A Novel’ by Glen David Gold”
Glen David Gold’s massive new novel begins with a trick, a coup, the literary equivalent of sleight of hand. For a writer whose first book, “Carter Beats the Devil” (2001), concerned the grand story of a 1920s magician, this should come as no surprise. Gold re-creates time periods as E.L. Doctorow did in “Ragtime”…
“‘Duke Elric: A cross between Conan and Camus”
Maybe it’s the books we read when we’re young that stick with us the longest. That’s the time when books not only excite us, but seem to tell us about ourselves and our futures. As a teenager I read (wallowed in and feasted upon, really) Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, “Great Expectations” and “David Copperfield,”…
‘West of the West’ by Mark Arax
The title of Mark Arax’s collection of reportage “West of the West” comes from Theodore Roosevelt, who famously said: “When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West.” Roosevelt’s remark helped create our idea of a state that is not only golden…
“Bunny hops onto the trail”
Money Walks,” a serial novel by 16 Los Angeles writers who will be appearing at this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, runs Monday through Saturday until April 24. The festival takes place on April 25 and 26 at UCLA. Bunny guided the old Bentley toward…
“New in paperback: Wit, elegance and war”
Two great sneaker companies, Adidas and Puma, were created by two brothers who began as partners and later turned into fierce rivals. Who knew? Smit limns out the story of Adi and Rudi Dassler, who started a shoe business in their mother’s laundry room, achieved international success almost immediately and then went to war.