The first thing to say about The Art of Sleeping Alone is that it’s very French. It’s slim, chic and humorless, that is, a sophisticated bagatelle of a volume, filled with detours to exotic locales: the Sahara, Goa in India, the Greek island of Hydra.
The great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño liked to argue, plausibly enough, that poetry is a higher calling than fiction. He also liked to argue, with no plausibility at all, that he was a better poet than a novelist. “The poetry,” he said, “makes me blush less.” Like so many writers, Bolaño (1953-2003) was an unreliable guide to his own oeuvre.
To make Seven American Deaths and Disasters Goldsmith has combed through archival radio and television broadcasts of painful events over the past six decades: there are chapters about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon; the explosion aboard the space shuttle Challenger; the shootings at Columbine High School; the attacks at the World Trade Center; and the death of Michael Jackson — and he has transcribed the reports as they unfurled on the air, live and unmediated.
Edna O’Brien’s fourth novel, August Is a Wicked Month (1965), displayed one of the best author photographs of the 20th century. It’s reprinted on the cover of Country Girl, Ms. O’Brien’s new memoir. It depicts the young author, cigarette clasped between her middle fingers, glancing to her left at some unseen provocation. The photograph is suggestive of both innocence and experience. It seems to promise: This girl is trouble.
One of the drawbacks of working in a bookstore, something I did for many years, is that it can be like working in a small-town pharmacy: You learn things about people you might rather not know.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the years he most assiduously kept a diary, the actor Richard Burton (1925-84) had the following pet names for his wife, Elizabeth Taylor: Lumpy, Booby, Old Fatty, Shumdit, Cantank, Old Snapshot and the Baby. She sometimes called him, who knows why, Darling Nose and Drife.
Leela, the young exotic dancer at the center of “Beautiful Thing,” is a genius of vulgarity. In this intimate and valuable book of literary reportage by Sonia Faleiro nearly every word out of Leela’s mouth is spit like a cartoon hornet. Few of these sentences, alas, are publishable here.
The global banking crisis that began in 2007 has brought some good books into being, volumes historians will consult when reflecting on these hard times. It has also given us some wild cards, unexpected treats that belong on the shelf once labeled belles-lettres but now more commonly known (thanks to Dave Eggers’s annual paperback anthologies) as nonrequired reading.
When Tsutomu Yamaguchi died two weeks ago, at 93, he was eulogized as a star-crossed rarity: a man who lived through two atomic blasts, at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki. He was a man with very good luck, or very bad luck. It’s hard to decide.
