OKAY, okay, I'll admit it's a bit corny to post on verse during National Poetry Month, but I couldn't resist. I turned to some distinguished friends of The Misread City, from different walks of life, to tell my readers which recent books they're excited about. (I'm eager, too, to have some new titles to augment my on-again, off-again collection of Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, James Fenton, Philip … [Read more...]
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
THIS Saturday I am quite honored to be moderating a panel with three very fine novelists of my generation at the LA Times Festival of Books. The panel -- "Writing the Fantastic" -- takes place at 2, in Moore 100 on the UCLA Campus.One of my obsessions the last few years has been the move away from realism -- and in many cases toward genre -- by writers born in the late '60s and early '70s. I sort … [Read more...]
The Persistence of Frank Herbert’s "Dune"
THE novel Dune, started out about as unpromisingly as a novel can -- published after many rejections, on a press specializing in auto manuals. But spoke to its own time as well as to ours, and it's still the best-selling sf novel ever.HERE is my LA Times story on the novel and its legacy in literature, ideas and film.There are of course all kinds of connections between Dune with Star Wars and … [Read more...]
Cool New Blog Launch
TODAY I want to announce the launch of a new blog dedicated to subjects of pressing importance here in California -- education, books, technology, libraries and reading. Dig Me Out -- the name comes from the founder's roots in '90s indie rock -- looks at these subjects and takes a special interest in Young Adult fiction.It's run by Pasadena school librarian Sara Scribner, who like many of her ilk … [Read more...]
Ian McEwan, Past and Present
THE new Ian McEwan novel, Solar, has just been reviewed in the New York Times, where Michiko Kakutani calls it both his funniest novel yet -- similar to the satire of David Lodge -- and a failure at the level of plot.It makes me recall (chin-stroking music, please) the time I spent by with the shy and gracious British author in front of a fire at New York's Gramercy Hotel one drizzly spring day. … [Read more...]
The Return of LA Noir
ONE of LA's greatest exports has always been dread, and our signature writer is still, three quarters of a century later, noir novelist Raymond Chandler. And now, thanks to a new anthology, all that murder, deception and unpleasantness is back.A few years back, local mystery writer Denise Hamilton (The Last Embrace) and Brooklyn's Akashic Books put together a collection called Los Angeles Noir … [Read more...]
New Editor at Paris Review
I've been hearing about the legendary Lorin Stein -- a hip young editor at Farrar Straus and Giroux, probably the coolest of the major houses -- for years now. So I wasn't alone in cheering when he was appointed the new editor of the storied Paris Review.Stein -- who has edited novels by Denis Johnson, the press's translations of Bolano's Savage Detectives and 2666, and three of the five National … [Read more...]
Overpopulation and Robert Silverberg
This week sees the reissue of The World Inside, a long-obscure science-fiction novel that could become a miniseries on HBO.Of course, it's delicious to think of this hyper-urbanized future world -- in which people live in 800-story apartment complexes and have sex whenever they want -- serving as the setting for the next Deadwood or The Wire.The novel's author, Robert Silverberg, is a veteran sf … [Read more...]
Cool New California Novel
A fine new book with a perfect-pitch Southern California setting, has just dropped: Model Home, which starts out in an '80s gated community, is the first novel by Eric Puchner, whose Music Through the Floor provoked Charles Baxter to call it "the most auspicious debut of a short story collection that I have encountered in years." Model Home looks at a family that's driven by golden dreams, but … [Read more...]
Vancouver and The Future of William Gibson
I SEEM to be hearing a lot about Vancouver these days. Not sure why, but it reminds me of my one trip to that glorious city to interview visionary novelist William Gibson. The writer often credited with foreseeing the Internet and much of hacker culture, Gibson was about to publish Spook Country, his second novel (after Pattern Recognition) to concentrate on the more-or-less present.Gibson was as … [Read more...]