By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Here’s something fun. From Kenneth Tynan’s lavish 1977 New Yorker profile of Mel Brooks (available online only to New Yorker subscribers though you can also find it in Tynan’s wonderful collection, Profiles): After separating from his...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader 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...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader September 16, 2014 Hard to imagine having a cooler job than the one Gregg Sutter had for more than 30 years, when he served as the late Elmore Leonard’s researcher. Sutter is the editor of the Library of America’s Elmore Leonard...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader November 16, 2015 The good people at Taschen have decided to show us more of sports photographer Neil Leifer’s work, and this is a very good thing. We’re in the thick of football season now, and I can think of no finer accompaniment...
By John Schulian The Stacks Reader April 4, 2018 There were unknowns piled atop unknowns when I began planning to give up my newspaper sports column and light out for Hollywood. Foremost among them was whether Steven Bochco would answer the letter I sent him. He was...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader A Siegel Film, Don Siegel’s account of his life as a film director is an entertaining and instructive guide to making movies. I especially like the section about Siegel’s experience working with Walter Matthau on Charley Varrick. For a...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader August 19, 2017 My mother is Belgian and throughout my childhood we entertained relatives when they came through New York. Not just my grandparents, my aunts and uncle, but cousins, friends, and friends of friends. My father was a...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader I thought you might appreciate this letter written by Nicolai Malko to Vladimir Nabokov. Here, let Malko’s son, George—a fantastic writer and an equally swell guy—explain: The letter was written when my father was in his fifth year as...
By Ivan Solotaroff The Stacks Reader November 11, 2013 Charlie Barnett was pivotal in getting started as a full-time journalist. I spent close to six months—a late fall, entire winter, and early spring—watching him and getting to know his story—not only his crack...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader I’ve never read Conversations with Wilder, the hell is wrong with me? Man, I need to correct that. I’m grateful that I tuned in to Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing interview with Cameron Crowe, who put the book together, and has some...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader May 22, 2016 Rich Cohen writes books that are hard to put down. From Tough Jews and The Record Men to his hilarious memoir, Sweet and Low: A Family Story, to the hearty—and heartfelt—appreciation of the 1985 Chicago Bears, Cohen is...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader The origins of “The Gookie,” from one of the great showbiz memoirs, Harpo Speaks! The man who first inspired me to become an actor was a guy called Gookie. Gookie had nothing to do with the theatre. He rolled cigars in the window of a...
