This year's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tinkers by Paul Harding, is one of the best I've read in years. The slim 191-page book is about the last eight days of dying clock repairman George Washington Crosby, whose hallucinating mind wanders across time in his final hours, stopping at disordered points in his life and that of his father. The first novel by Harding, Tinkers was rejected by numerous publishers and sat in a drawer for several years before it found a home at Bellevue Literary Press, an obscure ... read more

On a recent trip to the local Barnes & Noble, I was surprised to see Russell Baker's Growing Up in the autobiography section. The book came out 26 years ago and Baker has faded from the public spotlight since his retirement in 1998 from the New York Times, where he was a popular columnist. I picked the book up, figuring it must be a pretty good memoir to have outlasted the author's fame, and noticed a week later that the bookstore had already reordered a copy. Baker's book is a great memoir. He tells the story of ... read more

New York magazine has an interesting story about how photographer Annie Leibovitz has made such a disaster of her finances that she may lose her homes and the copyright to all her work. She's made millions while accumulating millions more in debt. Here's one of the craziest anecdotes about her profligate spending: When [her daughter] Sarah started eating solid food, a rigorous journaling policy was instituted, in which every bite and bowel movement was to be committed to an unlined black notebook purchased from ... read more

Rutgers University has broken the world record for the largest gathering of Waldos. Here's a funny photo of the crowd filling the theater. I hope the students remained in costume that evening for the world's largest drunken Waldo bacchanalia. ... read more

I don't read many thrillers, but I asked to review David Morrell's The Spy Who Came for Christmas after it was advertised recently on the Drudge Retort. I'm a sucker for holidaymas-themed books and films, and the title got my attention with its evocation of John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Morrell, a prolific thriller author who created Rambo in 1972's First Blood, centers his new book on Kagan, an American spy who has committed an escalating serious of heinous acts while working undercover with ... read more

I found a great "cyber-cowboy post-apocalyptic fu" music video on another blog this morning. Watch for the appearance of Col. Wilma Deering, the Planet of the Apes Statue of Liberty and the film crew in a mirror: This video for Muse's "Knights of Cydonia" is the work of Joseph Kahn, a prolific music video director whose next project is a film based on William Gibson's Neuromancer. (Via Stan!.) ... read more

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker literary prize: Adiga becomes the third debut novelist, and the second Indian debut novelist, to win the award in the forty year history of the prize. The two other debut novelists to have won the prize are DBC Pierre in 2003 for his novel Vernon God Little and Arundhati Roy in 1997 for The God of Small Things. Aravind Adiga's winning novel The White Tiger is described as a "compelling, angry and darkly humorous" novel about a man's journey from ... read more