Do you remember how the last third of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made you hate Tom Sawyer? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Robert Coover takes Mark Twain’s iconic characters, ages them about 30 years, places them in Deadwood just before America’s centennial, and uses them to expose the ignorance, violence and cruelty at the heart of America’s westward expansion. If The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was mostly an adventure story for boys, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a story of the loss […]
Must Read TV
One of the foremost pleasures of reading Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz’s exhaustive list of the greatest American TV is getting confirmation that there are people out there who watch way more TV than you. From their childhoods spent in front of television sets to their jobs as critics at the Newark Star-Ledger through to their current online prominence, Sepinwall and Seitz have as much claim as anyone to authoritatively state that they know which shows are best. TV (The Book) mainly takes the […]
By the Light of the Silvery Moon
Michael Chabon is no stranger to strangeness. His novels are a cavalcade of oddballs and unusual circumstances, from the relocated Jews in Alaska of Yiddish Policeman’s Union to the comic-book artists of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. His latest opus may seem from a logline to be a more conventional offering, but in structure and detail it is just as unusual as any of his other novels. The novel purports itself to be a memoir of a writer named Michael Chabon learning his […]
Life Aboard the Busted Flush
Travis McGee will confound your expectations. An unlikely hero for a detective novel, or any kind of novel at that, John D. MacDonald’s most famous creation is a man who has figured himself out. All it takes for him to be completely happy is a quiet life about his houseboat, the Busted Flush, with good food, good drink, and some occasional female companionship on his terms. To finance this life of Reilly, McGee takes work only when he has to, and it’s an odd line […]
Blondes, Boxers, and Dead Bodies
Did you ever hear the Steve Goodman song, “You Never Even Called Me By My Name”? (A more popular version was recorded by David Allan Coe.) It’s subtitle is “The Perfect Country and Western Song” because it was a joking attempt by Goodman and his co-writer John Prine to squeeze every stereotypical feature of country-western music into just one song. In one of the final verses Goodman, responding to Coe’s complaints about what has been left out, empties the bucket in a ridiculous fashion just […]
God Bless Us, Everyone!
To close out my cannonball, I thought it’d be seasonally appropriate to revisit a Christmas classic. I say “revisit” even though I had never before read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but due to its cultural ubiquity I felt like I have. Like most people I’ve seen multiple adaptations of the story, from the Reginald Owens and Alistair Sim black-and-white movies to Michael Caine with the Muppets and the tragically typecast Scrooge McDuck in the Disney version, I’ve seen them all. So in reading the novella […]
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