Wednesday, October 28, 1998

Modern Pulp: The Times' Top Five Fiction Bestsellers: Reviewed by Andrew Grossman

Well, if you've managed to avoid this week's bestsellers, here's your chance to catch up. Entertain friends at cocktail parties, make smalltalk, hit on bridesmaids at suburban weddings, all without having to read these works of kindling. The Dartmouth Review does it all for you.

Panero on the Rothko Retrospective

Before I hit on Rothko forgive me if I'm excited about the Jackson Pollock megashow opening this Sunday at MoMA. Pollock put the action in action painting, urinated into Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace, kicked the crap out of the European surrealists, and turned the art world into a State school fraternity party starting 1950.

A Right Turn on a Red Light: Ben Oren Reviews 'The Comedy Writer'

The other book is The Comedy Writer by Peter Farrelly. Farrelly's story is an interesting companion piece to What Makes Sammy Run because The Comedy Writer asks what if Manheim was surrounded by Sammy Glick 24-7?

Mastering the Lindy Hop: Jeffrey Hart Reviews 'Lindbergh'

Nine years in preparation, A. Scott Berg's biography of Charles Lindbergh is a masterly work. He is the first to have been granted full access to the Lindbergh archive at Yale — all twenty thousand boxes of it; Lindbergh saved everything — as well as the Anne Morrow Lindbergh collection, and much else.

Collins V. Pynchon: Literary Hexathalon

The books I read this summer went from good to boring to really quite horrible. The problem with long books is that they can start out well and disintegrate; i.e. Harlot's Ghost by Norman Mailer. (If you've never read this book, don't. It's 1,200 pages long, and the last three words are "To be continued."

Spandex, Candy Corn, and One Big Hill

Trudging up the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro at 4 in the morning at 17,000 feet, I stopped and stared upwards and there was only one thought in my mind: cripes, its immense! I was not referring to the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro but rather the gigantic spandex-clad rump before my eyes. I was hoping that it was Cindy, the thirty year old vixen from London.