Dec 15, 2018 | 2010s, Alex Belth, Editor's Notes, ESQUIRE, Movies, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic, October, 2016 Fame is fleeting in all pop culture—movies, music, writing, sports: today’s stars, tomorrow’s Where Are They Now’s. This feels especially true in journalism. Who but a small group of nonfiction-loving nerds pays attention...
Oct 8, 2018 | 1970s, Diane K. Shah, Profiles, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Diane Shah The National Observer, May 20, 1976 I came from this incredibly high-powered family. My mother was sort of a Viking. Very bright, and utterly contemptuous of everyone else. When I told her I had read The Three Musketeers, she said, “undoubtedly a waste...
Aug 7, 2018 | 1970s, Features, Gail Sheehy, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Gail Sheehy Rolling Stone, July 14, 1977 November 20th, 1976, a Saturday night, Clay Felker, the New York magazine publisher, invited Rupert Murdoch, the Australian publisher, to dine at Elaine’s to celebrate the announcement that had hit New York by surprise the...
Jul 22, 2018 | 1980s, J. Anthony Lukas, Profiles, The Arts, The Literary Life
By J. Anthony Lukas GQ, Dec 1984 Anonymous in their green Ford Fairmont, the plainclothesmen pull to the casino door and beckon three men into the backseat. Nosing into midday traffic, they head for the Italian community along North Georgia Avenue. “That’s where he...
May 18, 2018 | 1980s, Book Excerpts, Richard Kluger, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Richard Kluger From The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, 1986 Of all James Bellows’s efforts to strengthen the Tribune, none was more striking than his willingness to take chances on new young writers, whom he encouraged to work in whatever...
May 16, 2018 | 1980s, Criticism, James Wolcott, The Arts, The Literary Life
By James Woolcott The New York Review of Books, November 4, 1982 The Purple Decades: A Reader by Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 396 pp., $17.50 Not since Garry Wills uncorked his rather fanciful notions on the origins of the cold war in the opening pages of...
May 16, 2018 | Alex Belth, Editor's Notes, The Arts, The Literary Life
Tom Wolfe died a couple of days ago and if you have never read his entertaining and much-celebrated non-fiction, well, now is as good a time as any to dig in. Start with the relatively straight-forward “The Marvelous Mouth of Cassius Clay” featured in the October 1963...
Apr 30, 2018 | 2010s, Book Excerpts, Luis Alberto Urrea, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Luis Alberto Urrea From Red Caddy, 2018 The License Plate Said “Hayduke”: Chuck Bowden and the Red Cadillac “I try to construct a theory of how a moral person should live in these circumstances, and how such a person should love.” Charles Bowden, Desierto “Love”...
Apr 12, 2018 | 2010s, Alex Belth, Interviews, Movies, The Arts, The Literary Life
I love anthologies of magazine journalism but you don’t see them published much these days and that’s a damn shame. Safe to say everyone around these parts is grateful to the university presses for keeping the fine tradition alive. We have Mercer University Press to...
Apr 12, 2018 | 2000s, Essays, The Literary Life
By John Schulian MSNBC, 2001 Not a holiday season arrives that I don’t think of a gray, clammy day long ago on Baltimore’s waterfront and a lost soul who told me about the woman who had given him his only gift in years: a Christmas card. It was just the sort of story...
Apr 10, 2018 | 2010s, Alex Belth, Movies, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Alex Belth The Concourse, October 6, 2015 One of the coolest things about Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction is that he didn’t get to it until he was close to 50 years old and had been a professional writer for more than 20. His books pared away anything unnecessary...
Apr 9, 2018 | 1960s, Essays, Seymour Krim, The Arts, The Literary Life
By Seymour Krim Playboy, June 1969 I was literally made, shaped, whetted and given a world with a purpose by the American realistic novel of the mid- to late 1930s. From the age of 14 to 17, I gorged myself on the works of Thomas Wolfe (beginning with Of Time and the...
