There’s a black and white photo in which the poet Stanley Kunitz lovingly holds Gerald Stern’s cheeks in both hands. It’s 1990. They’re looking into one another, and Kunitz says, “You’re the wilderness in American poetry.” …more

The 512-page sentence achieves what? “What makes some unpunctuated or oddly punctuated books great is the creativity with which authors solve the stylistic problem they set up for themselves. But in the case of Zone there is little attempt to play with the consequences of this largely symbolic decision.”

An unauthorized sequel to JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye has resulted in legal action: “In the book, he isn’t called Holden Caulfield, he’s called ‘Mr C’.”

Esquire is calling the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road “the most important movie of the year.” The director, John Hillcoat, says he wanted for the film “a kind of heightened realism” that could escape “the clichés of apocalypse.” But this trailer?

“Sex is everywhere in The Girlfriend Experience, except there’s no sex.”

Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits was first published in England. Dwight Garner wishes Broadway Books had deep-sixed the Britishisms: “Mr. Waits is a quintessentially American artist, and it’s jarring to read that he got into a ‘row’ or sat on a ‘kerb.’ I kept waiting for him to scarf a plate of bangers and mash.”

“I think historically modern economics, capitalist economics, tends to erode moral categories… And this is where I think the right gets capitalism wrong. They kind of assume that there is a moral equivalence or moral valence to capitalism, but I tend to think that economics erodes all the kind of cultural taboos and inhibitions and values it comes into contact with.” …more