Whatever Happened to Light Verse? A paean to a disappearing and misunderstood literary tradition. Kevin Mims 21 Jan 2023 · 20 min read
In Memoriam A tribute to five pop fiction writers we lost in 2022. Kevin Mims 20 Dec 2022 · 12 min read
The Bobos at 22 In 2000, David Brooks foretold an American utopia that never arrived. Kevin Mims 10 Nov 2022 · 16 min read
The Real Star of M*A*S*H A personal tribute to the overlooked genius of writer W.C. Heinz. Kevin Mims 11 Oct 2022 · 13 min read
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. Kevin Mims 23 Sep 2022 · 16 min read
Peter Straub, 1943–2022 Farewell to another of the Big Six novelists from the Golden Age of American horror fiction. Kevin Mims 12 Sep 2022 · 13 min read
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. Kevin Mims 2 Aug 2022 · 28 min read
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? Kevin Mims 19 Jul 2022 · 19 min read
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. Kevin Mims 20 May 2022 · 14 min read
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. Kevin Mims 5 May 2022 · 26 min read
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. Kevin Mims 25 Mar 2022 · 8 min read
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 Kevin Mims 22 Mar 2022 · 11 min read
Authentic Immediacy—A Tribute to the Political Fiction of Frederick Forsyth When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, one might have assumed that Cold War fiction would become irrelevant. That hasn’t turned out to be the case with Frederick Forsyth’s work. Consider, for instance, this passage from his 1979 novel, The Devil’s Alternative [https://www.amazon. Kevin Mims 18 Feb 2022 · 12 min read
How D.B. Cooper and the Golden Age of Air Piracy Changed Aviation Fiction Kevin Mims 24 Nov 2021 · 32 min read
