Went over to Borders in Scarsdale last week to hear the novelist Jonathan Tropper read from his novel of suburban disintegration This Is Where I Leave You. I just finishing reading the book myself, and enjoyed it very much. Tropper has a very nice touch. The book is a gallery of male archetypes, and pretty …
Yesterday the New York Times reported that in November, the University of California will publish the first three volumes of the 500,000 (!) word Autobiography of Mark Twain. The opinion is that this will restore acid to a writer who has come to be seen as “’Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who …
In The Guardian today: “The playwright Sir Tom Stoppard spoke today of his fears that the “printed page” is in danger of being edged out in a `world of technology’. “I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there’s more competition for one’s attention nowadays,” he said. “The printed word is no longer as …
ROSENKRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN AND NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES. . . Read More »
Thanks once again to my friend Lewis Burke Frumkes for inviting me to appear at the Marymount Manhattan Writers Conference. This was my third and unfortunately final year at the event, because the school has decided after sixteen years to close the program because it needed the space. Too bad; the conferences were very stimulating, …
I had a delightful time yesterday meeting with McCracken Poston, a lawyer and former state legislator from Georgia who told me a warm and delightful story about, of all things, a murder case he tried a decade ago. He and I are going to work to try to turn it into a book. McCracken and …
A belated thanks to my friend Michael Gross, who came up to Briarcliff a couple of Sundays ago. The Garden Club was having its annual Arts Abloom Festival for the benefit of the library, and Michael was the special celebrity guest, reading from his book Rogues Gallery and signing copies. Michael enjoyed his sojourn into …
Peter O’Donnell, who created the comic strip Modesty Blaise for the London Evening Standard in 1963 and who chronicled her adventures for the next 38 years, died over the weekend at age 90. O’Donnell began writing comic strips when he was 17, a nascent career that was interrupted by a stint in the army during …
Last Sunday, the Briarcliff Committee for the Arts had its second in a series of authors’ readings. My friends Joe Queenan and Giulia Melucci participated, and I was very pleased to be able to introduce them. Joe from his excellent memoir Closing Time, an often hilarious, more frequently harrowing account of his upbringing in a …
Congratulations to Lisa Birnbach, a colleague from Spy and a collaborator from Loose Lips, whose resurrection of her mega-successful The Official Preppie Handbook in the eighties earned her a front page article in The New York Times on Saturday. That’s Lisa in the center, talking to the famous designer and Batman buff Chip Kidd, and …
Headed down to DC yesterday to meet Cliff Etheredge, the rattlesnake-hunting, poetry-writing, one-armed Texas wind magnate whom I am privileged to be assisting on a memoir he is writing. Over a very fine lunch of lalibera rib and yesom wot at the Lalibela Ethiopian Restaurant on 14th Street (first time with that cuisine for either …