Jay Aubrey-Herzog

It’s a commonplace for comedians, actors and other celebrities to release hastily lashed together books that are little more than self-aggrandizing tributes to, in the words of Bill Hicks, their own fevered egos. Comedian Patton Oswalt’s new book is not one of those. It is not a tie-in to some other media product. It contains […]

The Professor by Terry Castle By itself, the title piece, a self-deprecating coming-of-age memoir, would be one of the most engaging books of the year, but add Castle’s brilliant and idiosyncratic literary/cultural/personal essays and it becomes essential reading. She’s funny as hell too. Long, Last, Happy by Barry Hannah A posthumous overview of a great […]

The figure of Mark Twain still looms large in the national consciousness, though there’s still a danger of him becoming merely an avuncular caricature, a harmless grandpa figure full of cracker-barrel wisdom. The first volume of three of his autobiography has just been released, and it reveals aspects of his personality heretofore hidden. Twain made […]

These days the only people who truly believe science fiction is about the future are kids, overly literal genre fanatics and ignorant literary snobs. The genre has always dealt in metaphors for the present. William Gibson has always known this, so it’s not surprising that over the last decade he’s largely discarded the futuristic elements […]

Weathercraft – By Jim Woodring – Fantagraphics Books Wilson – By Dan Clowes – Drawn and Quarterly   Dan Clowes and Jim Woodring are both idiosyncratic graphic artists and storytellers, although I bet they wouldn’t mind too much if you called them cartoonists. They both have roots in much earlier forms of comics, and don’t […]

The posthumous aspect of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s oeuvre casts a shadow over his work, which has garnered a cult following in the years since his death in 2003. The bulk of the English translations of his novels and poems appeared after his demise, and it’s hard not to read his final books as some […]

Four decades have passed since John Waters made his first transgressive cinematic assaults on good taste. His comic trash sensibility, so daring in the midnight movie heyday of the ’70s, has become so commonplace that his most recent films show the strain of trying to shock an audience that’s become more jaded than he is. […]

The last few years have seen an explosion of scandals when supposed "true life" memoirs have been revealed to be fabrications and fictions. James Frey was forced to recant in the church of Oprah, street kid celebrity author JT Leroy turned out to be a fictional character himself (or herself), and many first novels from […]

A professor of 18th century literature at Stanford for the past few decades, Terry Castle was previously known best as the editor of such books as The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. The Professor and Other Writings, which compiles her literary journalism from the past decade along with a book-length autobiographical essay, is […]