A while back, Jeff Bryant asked me who I consider to be an underrated writer for a list he was compiling over at Syntax of Things. Alas, I am slow as molasses, so I sent my response in too late, but here’s what I would’ve said, had I been more timely: Not exactly underrated, here is a writer who has been– lately –underread: Mary Robison is a short story writer whose gift for the quick sentence and dead-on characterization is astounding. In some ways, Robison strikes me as a sort of literary equivalent to Lucinda Williams. She’s been a...

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Allen Barra, a fellow Alabamian, has an excellent piece in Salon called “Reading Lolita in Alabama,” in which he credits Nabokov with turning him on to literature and helping him to form his ideas about what good literature is: i.e., a work of artifice, not of ideology. He disagrees with Azar Nafisi’s (Reading Lolita in Tehran) take on Lolita as a deeply political text, citing Nabokov’s own words about literature as evidence that the master of modern prose wasn’t trying to make a political statement: Here, again, is Nabokov from that 1962 BBC interview: “Why did I write any...

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Over at Galleycat yesterday, I confessed my New Year’s Resolution: “to read an honest-to-goodness potboiler, complete with smokin-guns and dark-cloaked villains.” I’ve sort of avoided mysteries and thrillers for my entire adult reading life. The last mystery I remember reading is from the Nancy Drew series! So, along comes a book that might give me the kick I need, Tamara Silver Jones’s Threads of Malice, a continuation of the series that began with her debut novel, Ghost in the Snow. The novel contains corpses, mysterious disappearances, a trail of clues, and a tantalizingly ticking clock. Oh, and here’s an...

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I read Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld, over the holidays. This book was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2005, alongside Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. While I found the book enjoyable, my impression is that this novel is out of its league when it comes to the NYT list. Ultimately, it’s a satisfying beach or holiday read, but it’s intellectually slim. That isn’t to say that a novel must contain some sort of high ideas to be a good...

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