About...

 
A professional critic for more than two decades, Jerome Weeks is the arts producer-reporter for KERA, the NPR/PBS station for Dallas-Fort Worth. Before that, he was the book columnist and before that the theater critic for The Dallas Morning News ... more

Book/daddy's site ponders writing from papyrus to paper to pixels -- with occasional forays into vellum. 

Book/daddy's name puns on "bone daddy" and "mack daddy." Think of it as Pimp My Read. 
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Book/daddy's motto: Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt! (Roughly: To hell with those who published before us) 

- St. Jerome, quoting his teacher, Aelius Donatus

Book/daddy's logo. Only real book/daddies have it: 
(Hence the slash in book/daddy.)

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Books I'm currently recommending . . . 

Richard Price's best novel since Clockers, Lush Life is a slice of life on the Lower East Side, complete with the ghetto kids, the new bohemians, the old Jews -- and the cops. A restaurant manager at 35 fears he's no longer the wannabe artiste, the one he always thought would turn into a full-blown artiste. When he sees a younger version of himself get shot during a mugging (and then gets blamed by the cops), he comes apart. Price takes these cultures, generally oblivious to each other, and stares through all of them. Lush Life is a crime novel, a terrific literary thriller, a sampler of Price's namebrand talents with dialogue and deadpan humor. Price is after more than just law-and-order, crime-and-punishment, justice-is-served. This is a portrait of big-city America in the past decade. You think The Wire, Law and Order, the old Homicide series are the best TV has to offer? This is all that -- between covers.
In Life Class, Booker Prize-winner Pat Barker returns to World War I, the setting for her magnificent Restoration trilogy. Where those novels followed shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen through their convalescence and return to combat, Life Class follows three painting students (based on real Slade School artists Christopher Nevinson and Paul Nash) as the war approaches and they avoid it or embrace it. Elinor wants little to do with the war or with men: They're distractions from her art. Kit, a hot, young futurist, is primed for the war's industrialized destruction, while Paul flees his working-class background. As usual with Barker, the sexual relationships and war-time atmosphere (and gruesome battlefield details) are brilliantly conveyed: Her prose is lean but lyrical, compassionate yet cool-headed. No character is quite as compelling as Regeneration's bitter bisexual, Billy Prior, but the Great War's upheavals in art and combat, sex and class, provide Barker with material for truly exceptional historical novels. A new trilogy? One hopes so.

Best of the Vault

Pat Barker, Frankenstein, Cass Sunstein on the internet, Samuel Johnson, Thrillers, Denis Johnson, Alan Furst, Caryl Phillips, Richard Flanagan, George Saunders, Michael Harvey, Larry McMurtry, Harry Potter and more

ESSAY: Big D between the sheets -- Dallas in fiction more

ESSAY: Reviewing the state of reviewing more

ESSAY: 9/11 as a novel: Why? more

ESSAY: How can critics say the things they do? And why does anyone pay attention? It's the issue of authority. more

The disappearing book pages: Papers are cutting book coverage for little reason more

Thrillers and Lists: Noir favorites, who makes the cut and why more

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