Just finished B. J. Novak's One More Thing, which I really liked—there's a distinct, wry point of view, and some thinking-at-odd-angles, so even when the humor doesn't work (and it almost always did for me) there was still something interesting going on, including some surprising influxes of genuine emotion, at…

Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil All the Time is a recent one I've read that I really liked: grotesque imagery, lush prose, and souped-up strangeness. He also has a collection of short stories, Knockemstiff, that I liked almost as well. And horror/crime author Tom Piccirilli works almost exclusively in Southern…

Thanks for mentioning Hidden Horror, because now it's on my to-read list. I actually read Aaron Christensen's Horror 101 and always wondered if there would be a follow-up.

I love Aickman and that's a perfect description of "The Wine-Dark Sea." I'm also still stunned by the revelation at the end of "The Trains," but I think my favorite in that collection is "The Inner Room," if only because that's how I discovered Aickman, in a more jumbled horror anthology. It left me a little dazed,…

I've been having a good month: my favorite was probably Knowledge of Angels, a historical fantasy novel about differing religious philosophies, but now I'm reading Bill James's Popular Crime, nonfiction about how true crime stories become famous and how they're represented, and I have to stop to write something down…

One of my favorite actors. Hoffman had a gift for investing every part with emotion and power, and his presence in a movie was always a reason for me to see it. He played roles that were indelibly real to me and I'm very saddened he's gone.

I can see Shakespeare in Breaking Bad especially in Badger and Skinny Pete as a modern-day, perpetually-high Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to say that.

SPOILERS FOR BREAKING BAD AND THE SHIELD

I like the idea of the show going out in its proper blaze of glory, but I can't be completely happy about it until Boyd Crowder's week-to-week absence from my TV is compensated by someone getting Walton Goggins to record some Shakespeare audiobooks.

Watched Upstream Color. Semi-hallucinatory style (easier to follow than some of the reviews would indicate, though) and a delicately-wrought tragedy. Everything about the worms, the pigs, and the orchids was less important to me than watching two people try to grapple with the inexplicable ruination of their lives,…

Anthology film is exactly what I was thinking. Failing that, I would settle for a fluid adaptation that swapped scenery and casting around like mad, roughly akin to Cloud Atlas in format if not in tone. (Oh, and either Fincher or Lynch for Preludes and Nocturnes, but Mann for Season of Mists.) I started this at The…

Yeah, Piper Kerman doesn't have much perspective on Piper Kerman, which makes her unexamined life in the book irritating, whereas the show has perspective to spare on Piper Chapman and everyone else, which makes them all, as this article points out, as lovable as they are frustrating.

Breaking Bad is the other currently-on show I was thinking of, but even it has different ambitions—it wants you to contemplate Walt's descent as much as it wants you to enjoy the ride. The Shield, which I wasn't counting because it ended a few years ago, chooses storytelling, too, but in a darker and more relentless…

Justified is one of the most purely entertaining shows around, and this episode is a great example of precisely how it achieves that kind of smart, engaging storytelling. Especially in how it combines tension and comedy: is there any other way to watch that Tim/Colt conversation than with a grin on your face and your…

Hannibal works so well for me because the fever-dream quality of all its images both heightens and contrasts with Mads Mikkelsen's deliberately restrained performance. The lush, overripe Gothicism should drown out the many small evils he commits over the course of the first season, but instead, Fuller uses it to put…

I've been reading a lot of recent noir, from USA Noir (the collected best-of of the Akashic Noir series) to Megan Abbott's superb and delicately genre-revisionist Bury Me Deep, with its brilliantly done homme fatal. Currently reading Laura Lippman's And When She Was Good. The biggest exception to the month's theme…

I've read just enough Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights, and The White Album) to want to own what I'm reading, so I've put off the earlier essay collections until I can buy—probably at Christmas—the collected set. But your comments on Slouching to Bethlehem only got me antsier for when that day will…

Agreed. ("It's not TV. It's HBO.") I love and respect David Simon's work, up to and including Treme, but it's the furthest thing from a drama: it's competing philosophical arguments, anger, and jazz, punctuated by moments and meditations on joy. There's no "necessary next thing" for the characters to do; for the…

I would love someone to raid the Criterion Collection for me. I have more of a collector's sensibility than I could afford, and even at half price, the Criterion DVDs tend to come more expensive than their lesser counterparts, but they're beautifully done and accompanied by so many thoughtful special features that I…

I remember the commentary for season six's "Haunts," and Chiklis (who directed) talking about how during the opening cards sequence there was a tradition that the couldn't be an edit during any of the cuts (which he broke, because Vic Mackey will not play by your rules), and it's 1) impressive how much that continuous…