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Ann Beattie hasn’t been sleeping
Ann Beattie emerged in the 1970s in the pages of the New Yorker with a cast of post-grad characters who smoked pot, bummed around, fell in and out of relationships, and faced the world with a shrug and the latest rock and roll on the stereo.
By JON GARELICK | July 05, 2010

Dutch courage

David Mitchell's Jacob de Zoet revises historical fiction
When you've already written a novel like Cloud Atlas , which travels from 1850 to the apocalyptic future and back again, writing a historical novel might be redundant.
By PETER KEOUGH | June 22, 2010

Girls talk

Sloane Crosley and Emily Gould tell all
There's only one thing more dangerous than being an ambitious, attractive twentysomething female stumbling through the publishing industry, attempting to secure quantifiable career success and, also, a fantastic boyfriend: the impulse to write about it.
By SHARON STEEL | June 20, 2010

Joe Pernice and Joyce Linehan's collected tweets

The Twitterary Life
Those who pre-ordered the new Pernice Brothers LP, Goodbye, Killer , received a slender paperback called Pernice to Me , authored and signed by Joe Pernice and Joyce Linehan. It consists of Linehan — Pernice's Dorchester-based manager, publicist, and co-owner of his label, Ashmont Records — documenting conversations the pair had on tour and while the band was recording the album.
By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON | June 18, 2010

Explaining Ulysses — if possible

Bloomsday
James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness epic Ulysses is widely regarded as a benchmark of modern literature, but as anyone who has ever picked it up (or been forced to read it) can tell you, a sincere "What the hell?" is perhaps the most common reaction.
By KEGAN ZEMA | June 09, 2010

Review: Marmaduke

Bad dog!
Add director Tom Dey's dreadful live-action adaptation of the long-running comic strip to the pantheon of dog flicks that'll make you cry — for all the wrong reasons.
By ALICIA POTTER | June 09, 2010

Review: Alan Wake

Shadowplay: Remedy Entertainment puts on a light show
Alan Wake proves, once again, that developers don’t need to reinvent entire genres to make a good game — they simply need to play to their strengths.
By MITCH KRPATA | June 01, 2010

Wine and Chekhov

Failure: A Comic Strip
The cherry nerd orchard
By KARL STEVENS | June 02, 2010

Role model?

John Waters gets up close and personal
John Waters gets up close and personal
By SHAULA CLARK | June 07, 2010

Cool killer

Ace Atkins runs down Machine Gun Kelly
Ace Atkins’s new novel is what the movie Public Enemies should have been.
By CHARLES TAYLOR | May 18, 2010

26 cent book bin

Big Fat Whale
Books never to come
By BRIAN MCFADDEN | May 19, 2010

Review: On the road with David Foster Wallace

David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself treads lightly in the footsteps of a literary giant
David Foster Wallace had a crush on Alanis Morissette. He drank Diet Rite soda by the case. David Lynch changed him.
By NINA MACLAUGHLIN | May 17, 2010

Echo chamber

Men are from Martin Amis, women are from . . . ?
As Under-Secretary of the Ted Hughes Rough Riders (Boston Chapter), I have been delighted by two recent developments.
By JAMES PARKER | May 04, 2010

Review: The City Of Your Final Destination

A lazy, lush adaptation
Watching a James Ivory film is like entering a room aglow with plush furniture and exuding tasteful music and promising comfort and a brush with sensuality.
By PETER KEOUGH | May 04, 2010

Interview: Daniel Clowes

On going from Enid to Wilson
"If you had told me then that there would be cute girls coming to comic conventions in 15 years, I would’ve told you you were out of your mind."
By MIKE MILIARD | April 27, 2010

Terry McMillan brings her groove to Providence

Visitations
Terry McMillan, best known for her blockbuster novels Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back , made a quick stop in South Providence the other day to raise money for the Community Preparatory School and talk shop — with 10-year-olds.
By ELIZABETH RAU | April 28, 2010

Life after Pi

Yann Martel’s next allegory
In contemporary literature, the Holocaust is the okapi in the room: looming and somehow irresistible.
By CLEA SIMON | April 13, 2010

Hearts of glass

Ali Shaw’s modern fairy tale
In Ali Shaw’s debut novel, death by glass becomes a star-crossed love story in the vein of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale — a tragedy that strips away its isolated characters’ fears and defenses and reveals their bravery.
By SHARON STEEL | April 06, 2010

People gather to read a book about people who gather to read a book

‘One Book. One State. Literally’
Now in its eighth year, Reading Across Rhode Island is a three-month project of the Rhode Island Center for the Book at Providence Public Library. Its goal is to encourage readers across the state to read the same book and to engage in lively discussions about their reading.
By JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | March 31, 2010

Review: The Last Song

Emotional kidney punches involving arson, divorce, and sea turtle eggs
Bestselling novelist Nicholas Sparks ( The Notebook , Dear John ) and effervescent ’tween queen Miley Cyrus hook up for one of Sparks’s patented tearjerkers.
By TOM MEEK | March 31, 2010

Eat, pray, shove

Cooking with Mailer in two new memoirs
So after all the roarings and the thumpings and the garlands and the scandals, after all the sex and the jazz and the fires on the moon and the women’s-libbers howling for his blood and the glass bouncing off Gore Vidal’s head, the old lion ends his days in comfortable domesticity on the crooked fingertip of Cape Cod, nibbling teriyaki-infused oatmeal and reading baseball statistics on the crapper.
By JAMES PARKER | March 30, 2010

Review: Diary Of A Wimpy Kid

Leave It to Beaver , according to Eddie Haskell
Middle-school antihero Greg Heffley may depict himself as a comic illustration in Jeff Kinney’s bestselling kids’ books, but director Thor Freudenthal turns him into an outright caricature.
By ALICIA POTTER | March 23, 2010

Otherworldly

Brad Watson’s aliens
The characters in Brad Watson’s new short-story collection tune in to unearthly energies and heed otherworldly guidance, but they are, finally, all too human — just looking for a little transcendence.
By SUSAN CHAMANDY | March 23, 2010

Review: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

... Is a drag
In recent screen-adapted crime fiction, detectives are heroes and children are victims. In the trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson, the child victim is the hero.
By PETER KEOUGH | March 22, 2010

Tired sleuth

Can Walter Mosley kick the crime-novel habit?
Has Walter Mosley gone off crime fiction? With the creation of Easy Rawlins in 1990, Mosley perfected the African-American side of the genre — along with a poetic and insightful take on post-war LA up through the 1960s — in 11 consistently solid books, the most recent coming out in 2007.
By CLEA SIMON | March 16, 2010

Nasty fun

Sam Lipsyte asks and tells
In his books Venus Drive , The Subject Steve , and Home Land , novelist and short-story writer Sam Lipsyte revels in rage.
By ALEX BLUM | March 11, 2010

Booking it

Fiction, non-fiction, poetry
Spring fiction goes international, starting with a whiff of the Caribbean.
By BARBARA HOFFERT | March 11, 2010

Review: The Good Guy

As much fun as chlamydia
Writer/director Julio DePietro's first effort is every bit as obvious as it sounds, thudding from one symmetrically perfect cliché to another.
By BRETT MICHEL | March 02, 2010

Review: The Ghost Writer

Competent but dull
How odd that the two latest films by two of the world's greatest living filmmakers should be adaptations of bestsellers set on islands off the coast of Massachusetts.
By PETER KEOUGH | March 02, 2010

Good company

Inspector Montalbano might be the friend you haven't met
One of the attractions of our getting hooked on a series of novels with a recurring protagonist is the reassurance that once every year or so we'll have a friend to catch up with. What we don't like to think about is how it'll feel when that friend is in bad shape.
By CHARLES TAYLOR | March 02, 2010