“Over lunch one day, the wonderful magazine-essayist Andrew Ferguson gave me what he called the Cocktail Party Test for new books: Would you be embarrassed to show up at a get-together of writers and public-intellectual types without having read it? And the last novel he could remember for which that seemed true was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987.” Joseph Bottum relates that anecdote in The Decline of the Novel. (Bottum goes on to note the same thing is true of poetry, opera, … [Read more...] about Where Have All the Novels Gone?
Measuring out my life with coffee spoons ...and books
