(Books Territory): Moe Moskowitz, the co-founder of Moe’s Books in Berkeley, was known for a lot of things: his omnipresent cigars; his appalling dancing (sometimes to Cab Calloway on the store’s turntable); his political activism; and especially the way he held court at the cash register, riffing like Jackie Mason at a Friars Club podium.
This year is the centennial of Murdoch’s birth. It’s also been 20 years since her death at age 79. Distressingly, her posthumous reputation is in semi-shambles.
(Books of The Times): Ocean Vuong is a young Vietnamese-American writer — born in Saigon, he was raised in Hartford, Connecticut — who made his debut in 2016 with “Night Sky With Exit Wounds,” a strong and much-praised book of poems.
(Books of The Times): Every serious writer, I’ve heard it said, has one book whose title seems to sum up his or her oeuvre. For Wendell Berry, that book would almost certainly be “Another Turn of the Crank,” from 1995.
(Books of The Times): The new Ian McEwan novel, “Machines Like Me,” about a ménage à trois between a man, a woman and a sexy male robot, is pretty good.
(Books of The Times): Some poets are cutters, others are curers, showing up to every occasion like a condolence-wisher with a casserole. Chelsey Minnis is firmly in the first category. Her verse arrives well chilled. It is served with misanthropic aplomb.
(Books of The Times): It’s always been easy to admire Susan Choi’s novels, especially “American Woman” (2003), loosely based on the Patty Hearst kidnapping and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
(Books of The Times): There isn’t a single pickup truck in “Lot,” Bryan Washington’s first book of stories. The setting is Houston, but oil is barely mentioned.
They got more serious. By the time he was in his teens, he was breaking into houses and convenience stores. He stole cars, mugged people, joined a gang and got a heroin habit.
Williams and Merlo were together from roughly 1947 to 1963, a stretch during which the playwright composed some of the American theater’s enduring classics, including “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Suddenly Last Summer” and “The Rose Tattoo.”
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