You know, I hope, that your claim doesn't make sense. There will always be a million specific truths to say about a specific subject, but "history" is by necessity an abstraction from these specific truths. To quote a famous quote by Benjamin Disraeli: "Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without…

The A.V. Club

Anyone who likes Napoleon Dynamite should definitely check out Gentlemen Broncos. On this very site, Sean O'Neal gave it a scathing review, but I've been chuckling to myself over The Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years (GB's book/film within the film) ever since I saw a heavily bearded, newly castrated Sam Rockwell grabbing…

See also Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won the Oscar, I assume for that sensitive scene when he licks booze off the whore's tits.

After I watched Kick Ass, I checked out the comic of Wanted, which I found to be several orders of magnitude more repulsive than Kick Ass, the film. The movie seemed to ironize its notion of a crime-fighter, while the comic—obviously, a different story, but still bound by Mark Millar's authorship—was more of a…

Look out, this guy's here on scholarship.

"It's America, man." -McNulty's voice coach, a little too late

I'd tend to agree, even if I look forward to watching Breaking Bad more than just about any other show. Enjoyability and Greatness aren't exactly the same thing, I guess, since we're getting all critical about this. I can agree there's some hokey character writing, especially at the beginning, and still enjoy the hell…

Cryptonomicon seems like it's practically built for such shenanigans.

Trust me, Finnegans Wake would make a better TV transition than anything by David Markson.

One recalls the old comment that Jospeh Heller would make when interviewers confronted him with the accusation that he'd never written another book as good as Catch-22: "Well, how many of people have?"

I have to agree that the characters in Taipei feel, in their way "more real" than the characters in any BEE novel. The thing I wonder is if Lin has any understanding of the world beyond exactly what he says on the page. I'd venture a no, which is why Ellis is still, for me, a more interesting writer. I like my authors…

I've read Taipei, and I can't really agree. I think Lin is much more of a personal douche than Ellis (really: his twitter yesterday asked readers to bring him weed to smoke in Central Park), and honestly the prose just doesn't read to me as smart. Maybe that's just the difference between Gen-X and Gen-Y, though. It…

I apologize in advance, but I have written about the dichotomy between his two types of works, and here's the distinction I came up with: He writes 2 types of books, East Coast (the ones you like) and West Coast (the one, apparently, that you hate). The East Coast books are in the vein of Don DeLillo, and are sort of…

Just wondering, what makes him a particularly "loathsome individual"? I've never heard any particularly damning stories (mere obnoxiousness doesn't count), and anything he writes seems permeated with the sense that no matter how much loathing you might direct at BEE, he directs 2x that much and more.

I have the same opinion, and I say that as a DFW fan. His essays and short stories, and even later stuff like The Pale King, seem committed to not wasting the reader's time, while IJ seems exactly the opposite. It's as confusing as possible, and whenever I wonder about my opinion on this, I flip open my copy and find…

This would have gotten weird if you'd have revealed that the entire scandal thus far was due to Anthony Weiner's wife having a cuckolding fetish.

All I can say is, it really stirs me up.

Your question is about statistics, right? Well, if you consult some studies (A Billion Wicked Thoughts, for instance, tried tracking sexual interests via a year's worth of porn searches at Dogpile.com), the most commonly searched-for pornography is of the category Youth, by some margin. A near runner-up is MILFs. So I…

When I read about those mass killings for the first time, I couldn't even understand how a person raised in "civilized" society could go through with it. In the novel The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell goes into detail, and it is literally the worst thing ever. Yes, literally.