I know, I know. It’s a few months too late for year-end retrospectives. Indulge me, please. Without going into too much detail, near the end of last year, things were kind of nightmarish for me. Too much coughing, too much time spent driving in circles, too many fluorescent hospital lights. Although I had known for […]
In 2017, two pieces of mine appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books. I’ve read and admired LARB for years, so it was uncommonly exciting to see my byline under their banner. I got to discuss a new book by Jeffrey Eugenides, one of my favorite novelists, and the review I wrote on Barrett Baumgart’s China Lake: A […]
A Tom Stoppard play is a bit of a strange choice for my 2nd annual Best Book I Read post, being that I hardly even glance at plays, or even attend the theater much—certainly not as much as I’d like. But nothing I read this year bowled me over like Arcadia did. (Well, there was one other book, but […]
I hardly finished any books last year, at least compared to 2014, 2013, and 2012, because I didn’t keep track before then. My reading pace has definitely slowed from its grad-school zenith, but I also just gave up on a bunch of books—even pretty great stuff, like Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (I caved and watched the […]
I’ve never had anything against Aziz Ansari, though until recently I wouldn’t have called myself a fan. He got a ton of acclaim for his character on Parks and Rec, Tom Haverford, which made sense; good-hearted scallawags tend to click with people. Plus it helps that Ansari has the useful comedic skill of making self-deprecation look […]
Kevin Zambrano 