Overrated?

via online.wsj.com

Overrated is a popular word in the lexicon of literary critics, and who isn't a critic today? The word has the virtue of suggesting that the critic is smarter than other raters, which is always fun. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Literary Criticism

William Dalrymple Visits Leigh Fermor

via www.telegraph.co.uk

At 18 he left home to walk the length of Europe; at 25, as an SOE agent, he kidnapped the German commander of Crete; now at 93, Patrick Leigh Fermor, arguably the greatest living travel writer, is publishing the nearest he may come to an autobiography - and finally learning to type. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Henry Ford of Literature

via believermag.com

How one nearly forgotten 1920s publisher's "Little Blue Books" created an inexpensive mail-order information superhighway that paved the way for the sexual revolution, influenced the feminist and civil rights movements, and foreshadowed the age of information. Full Story

Powell's Books:
The Militant Agnostic
Haldeman-Julius

Tod Goldberg on TV and Movie Tie-Ins

via www.latimes.com

Does a real writer accept a gig doing books spun off from films or TV shows? Full Story

Powell's Books:
Burn Notice

Jefferson Hunter on Joseph Moncure March

via www.hudsonreview.com

...in the long history of the cinema, how many pictures, let alone boxing pictures, can have been based on a poem? Full Story

Powell's Books:
Joseph Moncure March

The Secrets of Storytelling

from www.sciam.com

Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling. Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions? Full Story

Powell's Books

Willard Spiegelman on Swimming

via www.theamericanscholar.org

The most famous swimmer among the English poets, Lord Byron, wrote a jaunty poem on the activity—one of the many activities—that made him legendary throughout Europe in his lifetime. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Haunts of the Black Massuer
Swimming
Willard Spiegelman

Evelyn Waugh Revisited

via online.wsj.com

For an English novelist who died an unrepentant Tory and apologist for the English class system -- simply put, a snob -- Evelyn Waugh, in the era of graphic novels and Kindles, is doing splendidly. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited
The Loved One
Vile Bodies
Decline and Fall
A Handful of Dust

Author of Book on Walking has 'Unwalkable Disease'

via www.nytimes.com

So, it has come to this. It's official. My doctor has confirmed what I had suspected for some time, that despite some "nonstandard presentation" and my solid belief that this sort of thing happens only to other people, I have gout. I am a member of that shadowy, shameful group, the "gout community." Full Story

Powell's Books:
Geoff Nicholson
The Lost Art of Walking
Gout

Herbert Gold on William Saroyan

via www.sfgate.com
Saroyan's voice, insistent, overflowing with humor, overcoming melancholy, wielding the American language with the freedom of a boy abandoned to a home for orphans, who read merely everything, listened to the babble of voices in Fresno and San Francisco, in the fields and barbershops, the streets, taverns and short-order joints, fully intended to take charge of his world, which was the only world that mattered. Full Story

Powell's Books:
William Saroyan
Herbert Gold

Why Raymond Carver's Legacy Keeps on Growing

via telegraph.co.uk

Twenty years after his early death, Raymond Carver's literary reputation is higher than ever. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Raymond Carver
Roses