Zoe Heller offers a reasoned, insightful review of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Chris Lehmann argues that a new biography of William Maxwell rests partly on a “jargon-laden claim” that is “simultaneously grandiose and banal — and more to the point, oddly irrelevant to Maxwell’s writing.” Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Jane Austen continues . . .
This weekend Mr. Maud* and I watched the inaugural episode (leaked by the BBC?) of the new Doctor Who series. It was pretty damned good (although I had some concerns about the one-dimensionality of the boyfriend character). After we watched it, I thought: well, that’s the only contact with culture (in the loosest sense) I’ve had all week, and I’ll . . .
My review of A.L. Kennedy’s masterful Paradise, turned in early last week, appears in Newsday today. Unfortunately, I omitted an important qualification from one sentence. The phrase that reads “a relative stranger, it turns out, and not one with whom she’s having an affair,” should read “a relative stranger, it turns out, and not one with whom she’s having an . . .
This post was written by Friday blogger Annie Reid. Annie signing off. Rumor has it that Maud Newton was spotted “slouching towards Bethlehem“, in pursuit of “some rough beast” (hawt!), but she might make it back to NYC by Monday. I’m turning the widening gyre to get her off course, but this goddamn blood-dimmed tide keeps lapping at my ankles. . . .
This post was written by Friday blogger Annie Reid. The pop culture/lit smackdown edition: Johnathan Lethem is in for some admiration and some scolding by John Leonard in the next New York Review of Books. In a column reveling in pop culture, Leonard crankily laments the influence of pop culture in Lethem’s work and suggests its time for Lethem to . . .