'Don't Cry' by Mary Gaitskill

March 14, 2009

There is always a moment in a Mary Gaitskill story when you wince. And then you shrug. The wince means, "Wow, that's a pretty creepy aspect of human nature to point out," while the shrug is a way of acknowledging, "But it's true. Life's really like that, isn't it?"

Recent columns

• Movers and shakers: A new book explores how changing your address changes your life

  March 8, 2009

  Scholars have a slogan: Three moves equal one fire. They mean that the amount of material—books, papers, belongings of all sorts—lost in moving from one home to another is so inevitable and immense that with each trio of jumps, one sheds forever the equivalent mass of what one might be forced to abandon in a tragic conflagration. That's how perilous and unsettling a move can be.

• An edgy, intense 'Story Week'

  March 8, 2009

  When it comes to literature, tame and tepid don't cut it anymore. Hence the theme of Columbia College Chicago's 13th annual Story Week, which begins a week from today: Writing on the Edge.

• 'The Way Through Doors' by Jesse Ball

  March 7, 2009

  Sometimes, a dream turns into a story. Many authors report having awakened with a fully formed narrative bumping around in their heads, demanding to be let out.

• Borders closing: When a bookstore bows out

  March 1, 2009

  It's not my favorite bookstore. Ever since they moved the fiction section into the dungeon—that may be a tad melodramatic, born of too many feverish readings of the Bronte sisters, but you do have to ride the down escalator to get there—I've been a little disgruntled with the Borders at 830 N. Michigan Ave.

• The hottest word in town—'Keynesian'—and the book that explains it

  March 1, 2009

  The word is spoken constantly these days, like a not-so-secret password. It shows up all over the place, an instant signifier of one's inclusion in the "in" crowd. You can hear it in major policy addresses by key members of President Barack Obama's economic team. You can spot it in the op-ed essays and blog posts of chin-stroking academics.

• What you ought to be reading

  February 22, 2009

  Exhaustion and cynicism and wariness: That's what grips the world after a long war, and World War II was a very long war, especially for the losers. It's also what defines your average detective, as she or he slumps and bumps along from pillar to post, from gutter to back alley to courtroom to seedy bar.

• Scarlett's daughters, Rhett's sons

  February 22, 2009

  Letting a single sentence mar an otherwise delightful book is a bit harsh, like dumping your best friend because she botches your Starbucks order (I said soy latte—how could you?), but still: Sometimes, it's the little things, isn't it?

• 'Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age' by Brian Ladd; 'Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America' by Cotten Seiler ; 'Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)' by Tom Vanderbilt

  February 21, 2009

  America isn't a country. It's a road. It's one vast, endless squiggle of highway. Up close, this road is perpetually splitting into smaller and shorter pathways, and finally these peter out into private driveways. Viewed as a whole, though, America is a big snarl of asphalt. It's a mess of meandering gray lines with a white stripe running right down the middle. Our people are always on their way somewhere else. Our best literature—John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," Jack Kerouac's "On the Road"—is generally about journeys. Our favorite movies, such as "The Wizard of Oz" and "Sullivan's Travels," are about going there and getting back.

• When authors go on attack

  February 16, 2009

  Ali and Frazier had their legendary clash, McCain and Obama had a few testy exchanges, and we recall hearing something about a recent matchup between the Cardinals and the Steelers—but for a real fight, for a titanic tiff, for a competition worthy of the epic battles waged on the windy plains of Troy, behold:

• Adam Gopnik's big adventure

  February 15, 2009

  He is a writer of dazzling skill and daunting accomplishment, but once upon a time, Adam Gopnik was just a kid with a dream.

• Happy birthday, Chuck and Abe: "Angels and Ages" is Adam Gopnik's gift

  February 15, 2009

  You don't know what you know—or what you don't know—until you say, "No."

• The Artful Abe

  February 8, 2009

  If you had a penny for every book, poem, play, poster, billboard, photo, statue, cartoon, etching, quilt, song, tattoo, T-shirt, diorama, portrait or coin—including the penny itself—featuring Abraham Lincoln, you'd be swimming in dough and whiskers.

• 'Drood' by Dan Simmons: It's A-L-I-V-E!

  February 1, 2009

  Everything seems skimpy these days. Things look pinched, narrow, watered down, washed out, choked off. So much seems to be shrinking: hope, energy, dollars, jobs. Even the horizon looks as if it were left in the dryer too long. We're trimming our sails, hedging our bets. Scrimping. Saving. Hunkering down.

• John Updike at the A & P

  February 1, 2009

  The work of certain writers is so remarkable that you never forget the first time you read it. The rhythm of the style instantly catches hold of something inside you. The word choices seem not just correct but also inevitable: A second after you read an adjective, you're sure that you knew it was coming all along. It's like the experience of hearing the winning lottery numbers: You could swear you'd have picked those very numbers, if you'd only bothered to participate. You just knew.

• The creator of 'Rabbit': At rest after dazzling life

  January 28, 2009

  You can see him even now, can't you? That tall, older guy joining the pickup basketball game? He's all arms and legs and lunges and grunts. He plays. He sweats. Then, spent, he goes home to a wife he doesn't love—or at least not as much as he used to—and to a life that doesn't satisfy, at least not as it used to.

• Of books and Obama: What does 'literary president' mean, exactly?

  January 25, 2009

  Now it's official. We have a "literary president." That is a good thing. That is a very good thing.

• Paragraph of the week

  January 25, 2009

  There are few soft spots in James Lee Burke's work. Just about every paragraph in his mostly Cajun-flavored mystery novels is as hard as a plank, with images that don't flit and hover but get to where they're going, with characters who don't hide behind fancy language but speak their troubled minds. His books are as ruggedly dependable as a pickup truck that's been around for a good long while—and that you'd never trade for something flashier or newer. And nobody has ever had a better run of titles: "The Lost Get-Back Boogie" (1986), "A Stained White Radiance" (1992), "In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead" (1993) and "The Tin Roof Blowdown" (2007) are just a few.

• "Sufficiency of the Actual" by Kevin Stein

  January 24, 2009

  Kevin Stein is used to it by now. When people first discover that he's poet laureate of Illinois, and then when they find out that Gov. Rod Blagojevich is the guy responsible for picking the state's first poet, everybody makes the same joke.

• Recall sticks to roofs of our mouths

  January 22, 2009

  Food recalls are serious business, involving grave issues of public health and safety.

• Crooks, chiselers, bamboozlers, charlatans and flimflam men

  January 18, 2009

  Picture it: A silver-haired Sam Waterston wearing a black baseball cap and a bemused expression, pushing his way through a moving hedge of reporters and photographers outside a Manhattan penthouse.

• Stephen King: AWOL from his own biography

  January 11, 2009

  Reading a Stephen King novel is like watching a Peyton Manning spiral: The question that keeps tugging at you, once you've gotten past the pure pleasure of beholding the thing, is, "How'd he do that?"

• 'Lark and Termite': A ferocious new novel about family and war

  January 11, 2009

  Of a character in her powerful new novel, "Lark and Termite" (Knopf), Jayne Anne Phillips writes, "She's forgotten nothing and is fiercely herself." It's a sentence that comes complete with its own GPS tracking system: It leads you straight back to the novelist herself.

• Our sob stories

  January 8, 2009

  Sad sells.

• Ringing in the new year with old books

  January 4, 2009

  We like to think of ourselves as stable, mature, responsible adults, but let's face it: When it comes to books, we're just like babbling infants in a crib. Dangle a shiny new tome in front of our eyes while we're traipsing down a bookstore aisle, and we can't resist. We lunge at it. We grab at it. (We might even stick it in our mouths, although bookstore managers, I've found, tend to frown on this.) We instantly discard whatever volume we were clutching in order to grasp more passionately at the alluring new one.

• Touting the "torch of lifelong learning"

  January 4, 2009

  A recent Lit Life column about "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books" (2008) by Alex Beam didn't sit right with Bill Siegel, vice president of school programs for the non-profit, Chicago-based Great Books program (greatbooks.org). As Siegel pointed out in an e-mail—a portion of which, with Siegel's permission, is reprinted below—Beam left out crucial aspects of the current manifestation of the Great Books idea:

• "Miles from Nowhere" by Nami Mun

  January 3, 2009

  It could be Chicago. It's set in New York, but "Miles From Nowhere" could just as well be happening in Chicago or Los Angeles or any big city. Any place with all kinds of people, and dirty streets, and broken sidewalks, and taxis and traffic, and apartment buildings and garbage and noise. And, arching over everything, an immense and somehow redemptive sky.

• Top words of 2008

  December 31, 2008

  Words are like "American Idol" contestants: You can't predict which ones are going to break out and become stars.

• Five best books by Chicagoans in 2008

  December 31, 2008

  "The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation" (Random House), by Elizabeth Berg. A collection of charming stories by the Oak Park resident who, book after book, finds fresh, funny and incisive things to say about women's lives.

• A quiet bookstore manager gets the star treatment

  December 28, 2008

  Neuroscientists would have a ball in this bookstore. They'd spot the metaphorical magic right away: Each room is like a separate area of the brain, sporting its own specialty and character. Yet it all functions as a single unit, too, a seamless whole composed of exquisite particulars.

• Paragraph of the week

  December 21, 2008

  Plausibility is an overrated virtue in fiction. If the story is good enough, if it's filled with characters you care about, then a few unlikely coincidences can't cancel the enjoyment.

• In celebration of the humble, essential bookmark

  December 21, 2008

  Bookmarks are about as low-tech as you can get. They are superbly utilitarian. They are there to do a job, not to dazzle or otherwise draw attention to themselves. They hardly ever require a service call.

• Hear, hear

  December 20, 2008

  Literature is like a blind date: We all pretend that looks don't matter, that what we really care about is inner beauty—but before we commit ourselves, we'd like to get a peek at the guy or gal.