Well, I’ve devoted my life to literature (to a lesser extent, to music) as a critic, professor, and author of eleven books, from fiction to criticism to collected journalism to memoir and poetry. I’ve won several awards and fellowships for my own work. So, literary history and biography/autobiography are in my territory, so to speak. You can find more about me and my books at my website.
Cowley was at the center of the Lost Generation in Paris and America, but he also was instrumental in championing such post-WWII authors as Kerouac and Kesey, among others.
This biography covers all his roles and interactions with such authors throughout his life. I found the book often felt to me like a fascinating lecture on the literary life of the 1920s-80s from your favorite English professor in college. So much detail is filled in on the lives and works of the writers of the period as they fit into Cowley’s own work and life.
To take one great example, the story of how Cowley was more responsible than anyone else for rejuvenating Faulkner’s career after his books went out of print, in part through Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner. After Cowley’s labors on Faulkner’s behalf, the obscure Faulkner went on to get all his books reprinted, taught in college courses, and eventually to win a Nobel Prize.
The stories of how Cowley got On the Road and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest published against the odds stand as other examples of the wonderful content for those interested, as I am, in modern authors and the world of publishing.
A finalist for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker
A delightful and majestic reckoning with the ascent of American fiction in the twentieth century through the prism of the under-known man who had an astonishing amount to do with it
Malcolm Cowley is not a household name today, but the American literary canon would look very different without him. A prototypical “man of letters” of his generation—Harvard University, a volunteer in the French ambulance corps in World War I, a rite of passage in Paris…
This book is a great companion volume to Adam Begley’s Updike biography of some years ago, but it is more like reading a lively autobiography because we follow Updike in his own words from his school years, through Harvard, his first publishing successes, and his many letters to friends and fellow authors, to the end of his life.
Mary McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Ian McEwan are just the few we witness Updike in fascinating and intimate “conversation” with on every topic imaginable, including theories of fiction, the publishing industry, personal problems and conflicts, good and bad behaviors, you name it.
That the letters are so uncensored is what grabbed me as a reader, especially. The material is raw but presented still through Updike’s high, articulate, often humorous style. I found the reading experience delightful, especially for such a long book from such a prolific author.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • The arc of literary giant John Updike's life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers—a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days.
As James Schiff writes in the introduction to this volume, of the writer who would eventually “express himself in written form as copiously and as elegantly as any American writer” before him, “Updike needed to write the way the rest of us need to breathe or eat.” With his stunning rhetorical gifts—enabling him to thrive…
Stories, essays & dialogues about art, imagination & the erotic life. A young man named Charles writes a series of erotic tales, and his bookish friend Lisa offers light-hearted critiques of them.
Some stories feel like erotic meditations or random erotic moments in a young man's life. Others start with…
Well, the title and subtitle say it all. Who wouldn’t be interested? I certainly was.
But it’s not just the 50s-the 70s that we see in this history of the newspaper; we are taken right up into the recent 2000s, and all the changes and permutations and personalities involved. The author herself worked for the Voice, so it is an inside story too.
Also, it is not just a biography of the major American voice in alternative journalism covering art, film, music, and literature. It is an autobiography of many of the writers and artists who tell their own stories during their time at the Voice in oral history fashion.
I knew I was getting the real, if sometimes conflicting, skinny on the personalities and evolutions of the paper. I found the whole thing engaging from start to finish because of this direct personal quality in the way the history/biography of the Voice is presented.
If you like art, music, literature, and films, you can’t go wrong with this one. I sure didn’t go wrong picking up this one.
A rollicking history of America's most iconic weekly newspaper told through the voices of its legendary writers, editors, and photographers.
You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms…
Have you been to Paris? If so, you’ll love this book as I did for the great photography, which is the whole point.
Photographs of the places still surviving where Hemingway himself and the characters in his novels visit. A long time ago in Paris, I tried something of the sort myself, finding and visiting the sites named in The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast, with only moderate success.
Friends of mine last year took this book along on a private tour of Hemingway’s Paris and found the guide followed this book closely. Each powerful photograph (mostly what the book contains) is accompanied by a paragraph or so of the site and its connection to the Hem.
I’d call this a photographic biography of Hemingway in Paris. If you place it in front of you while reading the Paris books, you’ll have a whole new experience, as I did, of Hemingway’s narratives.
Walk through the Streets of Paris with Ernest Hemingway.
In gorgeous black and white images, Hemingway's Paris depicts a story of remarkable passion for a city, a woman, and a time. No other city in any of his travels was as significant, professionally or emotionally, as was Paris. And it remains there, all of the complexity, beauty, and intrigue that Hemingway described in the pages of so much of his work.
It is all still there for the reader and traveler to experience the history, the streets, and the city. Restaurants, hotels, homes, sites and favorite bars are all detailed…
Family Recipes is the story of Vinny Marciano, owner of the most fabulously successful Italian restaurant in all of Upstate New York. All is pretty much hunky dory at Marciano’s Mangia House until the safe in the restaurant's business office is breached and the Marciano family’s secret heirloom recipes are…
If you trained to be a jazz musician as I once did, or if you love jazz, you’ll be fascinated by this story (both autobiography and oral history from those who knew Pepper).
It includes also journalistic and critical literary assessments of his music and life that Art and Laurie Pepper include, but mostly, I was fascinated by Art’s own testimony of the struggles of a musician in the 1950s and ‘60s.
By the 70s, Pepper was trying to go straight, off drugs, and his long struggle with that issue is documented by him, his wife, and his colleagues and friends. But he was indeed straight in a different sense—he played beautiful, lyrical, straight-ahead jazz, no free form self-indulgence. So I got a wide view of the man and music through the oral history and through the journalists and critics who wrote essays about him.
Ultimately, it is a tragic story, but a poignant if often painful one, and a tale of a huge natural talent. There is a complete discography at the end, and if you seek out, as I did, some of these albums and tunes, you’ll be impressed by the giant talent this guy had.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a more honest book, and I doubt you will have.
Art Pepper (1925-1982) was called the greatest alto saxophonist of the post-Charlie Parker generation. But his autobiography, Straight Life , is much more than a jazz book,it is one of the most explosive, yet one of the most lyrical, of all autobiographies. This edition is updated with an extensive afterword by Laurie Pepper covering Art Pepper's last years, and a complete and up-to-date discography by Todd Selbert.
With his collection Awakening, Begiebing tries to elude certain attributes in contemporary poetry often found in the most fashionable and esteemed publications. Joan Didion once described literary “unfashionableness [as] the final refusal to sail with the prevailing winds.”
Begiebing hopes this book avoids the tedious drone of prosaic intimacies and bathos, gnomic opacities, mechanical tricks and gimmicks of lineation at the expense of the natural rhythms of the human voice, and the general anxiety over language that elevates emotional or spiritual experience. Readers will have to determine for themselves to what extent he has succeeded in his efforts. He is grateful for those periodical editors who, over the years, have risked publishing his poems.
