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"Tipping the Velvet"
An exuberant, lusty novel about a lesbian adventuress follows its heroine through the underworld of Victorian London.
By Peter Kurth
[07/30/99]

Ivory Tower
Fire on the mountain
While astronomers celebrate the addition of another telescope to their prized star-gazing summit in Hawaii, environmentalists and natives mourn the loss of their beloved mountain.
By Alex Salkever
[07/30/99]

Interview
An impatient man
Garry Wills talks about the wit of St. Augustine, the necessity for gun control and the arrogant ignorance of the New York Times
By David Bowman
[07/29/99]

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"A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward"
A spirited biography of a 19th century ballplayer smacks a pie in the face of baseball nostalgia.
By Jonathan Miles
[07/29/99]

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"Broke Heart Blues"
The novelist explores the repercussions of a violent act in a town where life ends with high school.
By Michelle Goldberg
[07/28/99]

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Jeffrey Eugenides, novelist ("The Virgin Suicides")
This summer, having just moved to Berlin, I've been reading books to acclimatize myself to my new surroundings and to dull my withdrawal symptoms from leaving New York. My Baedecker here has been "The Gift," the book Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Berlin when he was roughly my age. There's a picture in the Brian Boyd biography showing Nabokov, his wife, Vera, and their son (in a pram) on a Berlin street. I'm also here with my wife, and we have a baby in a Martinelli stroller, and I like to pretend that I'm writing my own version of "The Gift."

To cure my homesickness, I've also been reading David Gates' story collection, "Wonders of the Invisible World." I loved Gates' first book, "Jernigan," and have been meaning to read his second, "Preston Falls" but haven't gotten to it yet. (I mentioned the baby.) Gates is hilarious and wicked and mercilessly honest. For instance, in one story his narrator says, "A late bloomer you could call me, if I were blooming." I read this book before my wife got here, all alone at a Greek restaurant every night, laughing out loud. One thing Gates does in the book is exercise the fiction writer's increasingly endangered right to go into whoever the hell's head he wants to. Gates writes as a woman, as a gay man, as an old religious guy with a debilitating stroke, and always convincingly. (My favorite is still the bitter, white, over-educated, hetero, middle-aged guy -- but then there are reasons for that.) The book has maybe one or two too many stories about failed marriages, but that's my only complaint. We all tend to write the same story over and over anyway. A few stories in this collection have been rattling around in my head for weeks because I just can't figure them out. I like that.

Oh yeah: one other book. Susan Bordo's "The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private." A feminist, semiotic analysis of the male image in movies and ad culture, its increasing eroticization, etc. I found the book sometimes loopy (there is one moment where she believes that her dead father's spirit has entered her cat) but mostly well-reasoned and startlingly empathetic. It's not as antagonistic as books of this ilk can be, but it's not "do-me" feminism, either. I agree with Bordo that the present trend in seeing the sexes as polar opposites (the Mars/Venus thing) is way overblown and that men and women have more in common than not. What can I say? The book made me want to be sensitive again, which hasn't happened since college.

Caroline Knapp, writer ("Drinking, A Love Story")
I just gave up on "Hannibal." I couldn't stand it. It's grotesque. I was on a book tour and I had room for one book, but then found I couldn't bear it. It was much more about Hannibal Lecter than I care to know. Fortunately, I was in a lot of book stores, so I had plenty of alternatives. I'm reading "White Oleander" by Janet Fitch and I'm liking it a lot. I also read Elizabeth Strout's "Amy and Isabelle," which I loved. And David Gates' "Jernigan," I loved that, too.

Ron Shelton, film director ("Bull Durham")
"A Rasta's Pilgrimage: Ethiopian Faces and Places" by Neville Garrick, "Pugilist at Rest" by Thom Jones, "Airships" by Barry Hannah, "Black Sea" by Neal Ascherson, "Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends" by Allen Barra and "Four to Score" by Janet Evanovich.
salon.com | July 30, 1999

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