After having published two novels by 1958, John Barth sat in front of a fireplace for two years, without moving or budging or repositioning himself for comfort; when asked what he was doing, the young man would respond, "Thinking." Come the end of this lengthy meditative period, a novel named "The
In 1990, Richard Nixon released "RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon," an account of his life that was praised for its unexpected candor and introspection; but thirteen years earlier a far more convincing narrative, also told by Nixon, was divulged in Robert Coover's "The Public Burning." The novel, wh
Boris Vian was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered today for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time of their rele
Bolano’s works are a wash of multiplicities. Art and literature are woven into crime and atrocity; literary culture is a whore to its own vainity; vanity is a strung out pimp in the middle of a thunderstorm; the story of person a: poet, custodian, radical transvestite briefly intersects with and is