Rodger Jacobs

Recent

Books

Klegg the Drunk: John Updike on Raymond Carver

John Updike the East Coast moral aesthete and Raymond Carver the West Coast drunken Everyman had more in common than met the eye.

Books

'Library After Air Raid': On the Survival of Culture Amid the Barbarity of War

War is a science, science is an art and art, as Library After Air Raid attests, is everything.

Politics

'Reading Jackie': When Literary Choices Become Biography

Despite her love of books, Jackie Kennedy Onassis spent a lifetime trying to prevent people from writing about her, sometimes with the accompanying threat of legal action. Her entire life was led with one arm thrust outward, eyes cast downward, keeping the world at bay.

Politics

Lynd Ward and Walt Disney: Illustrators of America's Tumultuous History

Much as Walt Disney would do with his famed television programs of the '50s and '60s, Lynd Ward used his talents with watercolor, oil, brush and ink, mezzotint, and lithography to illustrate hundreds of inspiring historical biographies of true-life American heroes for children to admire and emulate.

Books

Something Rare: Ernest Hemingway's Mystic Communion

The lure of mystery and dread in Catholicism that attracted the fatalistic author.

Politics

Life During Wartime: Carl Sandburg's Poetry of the Macabre

For every moment of brief tedium in Sandburg’s masterpiece, the master suddenly hits the reader with a scene or a moment that is breathtaking in its prose and cold, dispassionate observation of life during wartime.

Books

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

The Library of America Outdoes Itself with New Release of a Classic Updike Baseball Essay

Books

The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney: A 'Suspicious' Literary Biography

Marion Meade's new book begs the question: Are literary biographies necessary? Somewhere in the afterlife, Nathanael West is having a good chuckle.

Music

Afterword: Rhymes of a Rolling Stone

Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks is a superb work of theater, a classic, albeit cryptic, tale of triumph over adversity.

Rodger Jacobs

Books

Chuck Palahniuk: Just Shut Up

Postmodern novelist and essayist Chuck Palahniuk is the literary equivalent of a shock jock.

Books

DVR Alert: Orson Welles Film Fest on Turner Classic Movies (6 May)

Welles was perhaps the best friend literature ever had in Hollywood.

Film

Orson Welles: A Man of a Certain Ego

“The chief proof of a man’s real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness. It argues... a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself proof of nobility.”

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John Updike the East Coast moral aesthete and Raymond Carver the West Coast drunken Everyman had more in common than met the eye.

War is a science, science is an art and art, as Library After Air Raid attests, is everything.

Despite her love of books, Jackie Kennedy Onassis spent a lifetime trying to prevent people from writing about her, sometimes with the accompanying threat of legal action. Her entire life was led with one arm thrust outward, eyes cast downward, keeping the world at bay.

The lure of mystery and dread in Catholicism that attracted the fatalistic author.

For every moment of brief tedium in Sandburg’s masterpiece, the master suddenly hits the reader with a scene or a moment that is breathtaking in its prose and cold, dispassionate observation of life during wartime.

The Library of America Outdoes Itself with New Release of a Classic Updike Baseball Essay

Marion Meade's new book begs the question: Are literary biographies necessary? Somewhere in the afterlife, Nathanael West is having a good chuckle.

Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks is a superb work of theater, a classic, albeit cryptic, tale of triumph over adversity.

Postmodern novelist and essayist Chuck Palahniuk is the literary equivalent of a shock jock.

Welles was perhaps the best friend literature ever had in Hollywood.

Fear and loathing at Borders.

“The chief proof of a man’s real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness. It argues... a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself proof of nobility.”