I can’t believe I forgot to link to the second installment of my Paris Review Daily Culture Diary. It’s not any sexier than the first, I’m afraid, but if you’re craving more usage pedantry, solo drinking tips, or line-editing blow-by-blows, you won’t want to let this one pass you by. Here’s one of the mouse-over notes: After reading Brad Gooch’s . . .
Jonathan Franzen says “there isn’t a more hilarious narcissist in all of literature” than Sam Pollit of The Man Who Loved Children, which my friend Robb Forman Dew has been urging on me.
I’m back in New York, at least for now, but while I catch up you’re better off checking my Twitter feed than waiting on the RSS.
The first part of my Culture Diary — chronicling things I read, watched, and did the week before last — is up at The Paris Review Daily. Featured: Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis, Sam Lipsyte, Damages, Jenny Diski, Jimmy Buffett, Rebecca West, Panir Sabzee, Jonathan Franzen, alcoholic beverages… The silence around here may continue for a little while. I’m unexpectedly in . . .
Oxford American’s fifth annual Best of the South issue includes my ode to Miami’s Biltmore Hotel, which I grew up thinking was haunted and later trespassed in to try to find out. Obviously that’s the hotel, above, and here’s another old South Florida postcard showing a view of the canal. My childhood wasn’t all long afternoons of slow-flowing water and . . .