I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, given how steeped my childhood was in Bible stories, that R. Crumb’s graphic rendition of Genesis infiltrated my thoughts the way that it did, but I was. Because his book was the one that affected me the most this year, it’s my pick for Salon. What I say there is partly a retread . . .
“Snagged this from my managing editor’s desk,” said a friend who works at a newspaper, following the announcement that Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews will be shuttered. “The teaser in the upper right… Oof.”
Joan Schenkar retraces Patricia Highsmith’s footsteps — actual and fictional — through Greenwich Village.
The talented Victor LaValle, whose Big Machine I want to write about at length, discusses his favorite books of the year.
My only complaint about MFK Fisher’s delightfully bossy How to Cook a Wolf, a hard-times cooking manual first published in 1942, is that it has given me something new to worry about doing wrong: boiling water. “It can be said,” Fisher admits, “with few people to argue the point, that water boils when it has been heated to two hundred . . .