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“... Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the close of Remembering Roth, he bids sad adieu to ...”

“... Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by ...”

“... Drinking is part of the equation. I don’t mean to make it sound as if Antrim has become John O’Hara with a cell phone. No, a disciple of Barthelme conquers the territory of Cheever and Updike – it’s stunning. ‘Another Manhattan’, from 2008, the longest and most wrenching of these pieces, begins as if ...”

“... fulfilment through consumption and a white, white Christmas: even if you’ve never read Yates or Cheever or Salter, generations of cinematic art, from Hitchcock to Lynch, have prepared you for the nastiness below the surface of stuff like this. You assume there’s a dark underbelly, and there is. Betty is on her second marriage. She broke with her previous ...”

“... one Sinatra’s name was often linked with. Consider the following, from Cosa Nostra (2004), John Dickie’s history of the Sicilian Mafia: ‘Anyone who was worthy of being described as mafioso therefore had a certain something, an attribute called “mafia”. “Cool” is about the closest modern English equivalent.’ Discourse among ‘men of ...”