Nice Guys Finish Last…Unless You’re Reading

The first book that ever obsessed me, that changed my reading life, was  ‘Nice Guys Finish Last’ by Leo Durocher.  I was 12 when I purchased it with birthday money, from a bookstore in Rochester, New York, where I grew up. What first caught my eye was its bright yellow cover, which reminded me of… More

Imaging Figures: #2

If Woolf points, in “Walter Sickert” (1934), to the reciprocal stewardship of persons and things, adumbrating how the one can only be the custodian of the other, what manner of seeing structures the import of custodial care? We are meant, I think, to interpret care not in the penitentiary sense, not as though the two… More

Imaging Figures: #1

Each day I attach less value to the intellect. Each day I realize more clearly that only away from it can the writer possess something of our past impressions, that is attain to something of himself and to the one subject matter of art. What the intellect gives us back under the name of the… More

Walden Deck

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living… More

And the Winner Isn’t …

As most of you have surely heard by now, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s list for 2012 was announced mid-April, but no winner was selected from among the three finalists for the fiction category. The finalists included Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (read my review here ), and The Pale King by… More