Martin Amis — novelist, memoirist, journalist, critic, caustic wit, dazzling stylist — is dead. He was 73... Dwight Garner... James Wood... Salman Rushdie... Ian McEwan... Lisa Allardice... Boyd Tonkin... James Parker... A.O. Scott... Christian Lorentzen... Terry Eagleton...... more »
Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On It
There Are Only Four Jokes Anyway'
My most reliable source of jokes has always been barbers. You see them once a month, you’re a captive audience and so are they. I would never patronize a barber a second time who was a jokeless bore or dedicated dispenser of lousy jokes. A similar codependency develops between bartenders and drinkers. Learning anyone’s taste in jokes and all-around sense of humor is at least as important as knowing their job, marital status and hygiene
The Russian Efflorescence'
In 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo, Clarence Brown edited The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, an anthology with selections ranging from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Voinovich and Sokolov. In his introduction Brown writes:
“I now look back on this banquet of words with much pleasure, which I hope nothing will prevent your sharing. These writers, after all, continue in our time the tradition that has made Russian, along with English and classical Greek, one of the three supreme literatures of the world.”