Acclaimed novelist, editor, and critic Eric Miles Williamson, with the publication of his first book of nonfiction, establishes himself as one of the premier critics of his generation. There is no other book that resembles Oakland*, Jack London, and Me*.The parallels between the lives of Jack London and Eric Miles Williamson are startling: Both grew up in the same waterfront ghetto of Oakland, California; neither knew who his father was; both had insane mothers; both did m...

Say It Hot Volume II: Industrial Strength is a collection of essays on American poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and issues of interest to artists and academics. A companion volume to Say It Hot, these essays are brutally honest and acutely intelligent.From the book: “Literary authors these days no longer make livings off their work. Their books are not to be found in bookstores, and the books are rarely printed by major New York publishing houses. No one reads ...

East Bay Grease, Eric Miles Williamson’s now classic first novel, has received worldwide acclaim as one of the great depictions of working-class America in the latter half of the 20th century. The story of T-Bird Murphy, born in the tumultuous 1960s and raised in the ghettoes of Oakland by his mother, who rides with the Hell’s Angels, his father, who is an ex-convict, and the father figures who range from musicians to construction workers, East Bay Grease is a novel of di...

Three books in one volume: Advice and reflections on modern fiction from "one of the greatest creative writing teachers we've ever had" (Frederick Busch).In On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner advises the aspiring fiction author on such topics as the value of creative writing workshops, the developmental stages of literary growth, and the inevitable experience of writer's block. Drawn from his two decades of experience in creative writing, Gardner balance...

A “delightful” (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years.Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New York Times Book Review has brought the world of ideas to the reading public. It is the publication where authors have been made, and where readers first encountered t...

A never-before-published collection of letters - an intimate self-portrait as well as the portrait of a century. Saul Bellow was a dedicated correspondent until a couple of years before his death, and his letters, spanning eight decades, show us a twentieth-century life in all its richness and complexity. Friends, lovers, wives, colleagues, and fans all cross these pages. Some of the finest letters are to Bellow's fellow writers-William Faulkner, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ral...

“Bellow’s nonfiction has the same strengths as his stories and novels: a dynamic responsiveness to character, place and time (or era) . . . And you wonder—what other highbrow writer, or indeed lowbrow writer has such a reflexive grasp of the street, the machine, the law courts, the rackets?” —Martin Amis, The New York Times Book ReviewThe year 2015 marks several literary milestones: the centennial of Saul Bellow’s birth, the tenth anniversary of his death,...

The atypical autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize–winning, author of American Pastoral.How does a novelist write about the facts of his life after spending years fictionalising those facts with irrepressible daring and originality? What becomes of 'the facts' after they have been smelted down for art's sake? In The Facts - Philip Roth's idiosyncratic autobiography - we find out. Focusing on five episodes in his life, Roth gives a portrait of his se...

A New York Review Books OriginalAn uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only...

"Magisterial . . . make[s] you suddenly see new things in familiar books . . . brilliant analyses of a dozen or so front-runners in the Great American Novel sweepstakes." —Michael Dirda, Virginia Quarterly ReviewThe idea of "the great American novel" continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying more than 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. In this landmark book, the first in many years to t...

E. L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March. Now here are Doctorow’s rich, revelatory essays on the nature of imaginative thought. In Creationists, Doctorow considers creativity in its many forms: from the literary (Melville and Mark Twain) to the comic (Harpo Marx) to the cosmic (Genesis and Einstein). As he wrestles with the subjects that have teased and fired his own imagination, Doctorow affirms the id...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic shares recollections and reviews from his career at the Washington Post.In this book, Jonathan Yardley considers lesser-known works from renowned authors and underappreciated talents, and offers fresh takes on old favorites. Yardley's reviews of sixty titles include fiction by Gabriel García Márquez, John Cheever, and Henry Fielding; the autobiography of Louis Armstrong; essays by Nora Ephron; and Margaret Leech's hist...