Framing the Margins

Just a short note about format, while I prepare a longer post for tomorrow, and also start hammering out a long review for Martin Scorsese's best film since at least Bringing Out the Dead, and maybe since The Age of Innocence.

As you'll see, I've changed the link destinations for recently screened movies so that they convey you to the IMDb pages for those films, rather than those comparatively unhelpful, bare-bones pages that are all I have time to provide for movies I don't fully review. I've also decided to indicate more straightforwardly which movies I have reviewed, with links offered right alongside the titles.

Further down the sidebar, and in a bigger departure, I'm offering bite-sized write-ups of the books I am finishing. One major lifestyle change that assistant professorship has occasioned is that I am reading more quickly and more widely than I ever did in graduate school, and I'd like to share quick impressions from those readings (if only to remind myself of what I've just absorbed!). Pay particular attention—if I may so goad you—to the "Cream of the Crop" selections, since these are the "best"s among my recent reading. It's my own great fortune that two of these absolute feats—John Keene's breathtaking, poetic memoir Annotations and Patrick Somerville's laugh-out-loud funny and dexterously crafted story collection Trouble—are written by two men I'm fortunate enough to know. What I mean is: friendly acquaintance is not at all the reason for my enthusiastic response to their books, but it does make me even more excited to point you toward them and encourage you to buy them. Go ahead! Take my word for it!

(Image © Vintage International, cover design by Christopher Silas Neal)