Getting Fletch Wrong
Jon Hamm’s portrayal is an improvement on Chevy Chase’s goofball routine, but still bears little relation to the amoral cad in Gregory McDonald’s novels.
Peter Straub, 1943–2022
Farewell to another of the Big Six novelists from the Golden Age of American horror fiction.
Go Ask Beatrice: Notes on a Dishonest Decade
An outstanding new book tells the story of a wildly successful literary hoax. But it was just one of many.
The Delia Demolition
Why is the Atlantic slinging mud at the 72-year-old author of ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ on the eve of the film’s release?
Undiminished by Decadence
I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s and I’m happy to report that, for the most part, television and mainstream cinema today are orders of magnitude better than they were in my salad days.
Get Ready for the Return of the Abortion Novel
The abortion novels that proliferated in the late 1960s were filled with characters who are forced by carelessness and circumstance to make the most agonizing of personal choices.
The Western Reinvented. Again.
It has been 30 years since a Western last won the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards. That was in 1992 and the film was Unforgiven [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695/], directed by Clint Eastwood, who also starred in it alongside Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and Richard Harris.
Heading Into the Atom Age—Pat Frank’s Perpetually Relevant Novels
NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. British journalist Ed West recently published an excellent essay [https://edwest.substack.com/p/children-of-men-is-really-happening?s=r] entitled “Children of Men Is Really Happening,” in which he tied together the shrinking fertility rate wreaking demographic havoc across the globe and the Russian invasion of
