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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.
Ann Beattie hasn’t been sleeping
By JON GARELICK | July 02, 2010

Dutch courage

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.
David Mitchell's Jacob de Zoet revises historical fiction
By PETER KEOUGH | June 25, 2010

Girls talk

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.
Sloane Crosley and Emily Gould tell all
By SHARON STEEL | June 18, 2010

Joe Pernice and Joyce Linehan's collected tweets

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
The Twitterary Life
By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON | June 18, 2010

Explaining Ulysses — if possible

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
Bloomsday
By KEGAN ZEMA | June 11, 2010

Review: Marmaduke

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.
Bad dog!
By ALICIA POTTER | June 11, 2010

Review: Alan Wake

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.
Shadowplay: Remedy Entertainment puts on a light show
By MITCH KRPATA | June 04, 2010

Wine and Chekhov

The cherry nerd orchard
Failure: A Comic Strip
By KARL STEVENS | June 04, 2010

Role model?

John Waters gets up close and personal
John Waters gets up close and personal
By SHAULA CLARK | June 04, 2010

Cool killer

Ace Atkins’s new novel is what the movie Public Enemies should have been.
Ace Atkins runs down Machine Gun Kelly
By CHARLES TAYLOR | May 21, 2010

26 cent book bin

Books never to come
Big Fat Whale
By BRIAN MCFADDEN | May 21, 2010

Raw Boswell

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 14, 2010

Echo chamber

As Under-Secretary of the Ted Hughes Rough Riders (Boston Chapter), I have been delighted by two recent developments.
Men are from Martin Amis, women are from . . . ?
By JAMES PARKER | May 07, 2010

Review: The City Of Your Final Destination

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.
A lazy, lush adaptation
By PETER KEOUGH | May 07, 2010

Interview: Daniel Clowes

"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."
On going from Enid to Wilson
By MIKE MILIARD | April 30, 2010

Terry McMillan brings her groove to Providence

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.
Visitations
By ELIZABETH RAU | April 30, 2010

Life after Pi

In contemporary literature, the Holocaust is the okapi in the room: looming and somehow irresistible.
Yann Martel’s next allegory
By CLEA SIMON | April 16, 2010

Hearts of glass

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.
Ali Shaw’s modern fairy tale
By SHARON STEEL | April 09, 2010

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

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
‘One Book. One State. Literally’
By JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | April 02, 2010

Review: The Last Song

Bestselling novelist Nicholas Sparks ( The Notebook , Dear John ) and effervescent ’tween queen Miley Cyrus hook up for one of Sparks’s patented tearjerkers.
Emotional kidney punches involving arson, divorce, and sea turtle eggs
By TOM MEEK | April 02, 2010

Eat, pray, shove

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
Cooking with Mailer in two new memoirs
By JAMES PARKER | April 02, 2010

Review: Diary Of A Wimpy Kid

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.
Leave It to Beaver , according to Eddie Haskell
By ALICIA POTTER | March 26, 2010

Otherworldly

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.
Brad Watson’s aliens
By SUSAN CHAMANDY | March 26, 2010

Review: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

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.
... Is a drag
By PETER KEOUGH | March 19, 2010

Tired sleuth

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, t
Can Walter Mosley kick the crime-novel habit?
By CLEA SIMON | March 19, 2010

Nasty fun

In his books Venus Drive , The Subject Steve , and Home Land , novelist and short-story writer Sam Lipsyte revels in rage.
Sam Lipsyte asks and tells
By ALEX BLUM | March 12, 2010

Booking it

Spring fiction goes international, starting with a whiff of the Caribbean.
Fiction, non-fiction, poetry
By BARBARA HOFFERT | March 12, 2010

Review: The Good Guy

Writer/director Julio DePietro's first effort is every bit as obvious as it sounds, thudding from one symmetrically perfect cliché to another.
As much fun as chlamydia
By BRETT MICHEL | March 05, 2010

Review: The Ghost Writer

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.
Competent but dull
By PETER KEOUGH | March 05, 2010

Good company

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
Inspector Montalbano might be the friend you haven't met
By CHARLES TAYLOR | March 05, 2010

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