Malcolm Jones

When we talk about beach reading, we usually mean trash fiction. But it wasn't always so. There used to be novels--they weren't common, but they did exist--that managed to be both entertaining and thoughtful.

Summer reading lists always seem to focus on hardcovers--but who wants to lug McCullough on John Adams to the beach? Instead, we suggest paperbacks, a few can't-fail classics and, OK, a couple of new hardcovers.

Fifty years ago it took a talented adult novelist to capture the wayward voice of a generation in "The Catcher in the Rye." These days, kids just do it themselves.

Almost nobody remembers Krazy Kat today. It has gone to the funny-paper graveyard along with the Katzenjammer Kids, Rip Kirby, Terry and the Pirates, the Yellow Kid, Little Nemo and dozens-hundreds?

In his forthcoming novel, "Bad Boy Brawly Brown," Walter Mosley sends his hero Easy Rawlins in search of a young African-American man who's joined up with the Urban Revolutionary Party in mid-'60s Los Angeles.

In "Firehouse" (Hyperion), David Halberstam looks at the men of Engine Co. 40 and Ladder Co. 35, who work out of a firehouse at West 66th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan.

If you read biographies of artists to understand the people behind the work you love, you're always disappointed, because the facts never penetrate the mysteries.

John McGahern's "That They May Face the Rising Sun" is the most perfect novel I've read in years. By perfect I mean composed, or built, like a handcrafted table, with everything mortised and sanded and finished to a T.

Give Rick Moody this much: whatever "The Black Veil" is, it isn't just another book about a writer and his bouts with depression and addiction. The author of "The Ice Storm" does discuss the depression that overcame him in his 20s, his alcoholism and drug abuse and his kicking same in some detail.

Watching "The Last Waltz," Martin Scorsese's film of the Band's last concert in 1976, I thought, "This is where I came in." That is, the music preserved in the film-which has been freshened up and technically fussed over for a 25th anniversary reissue on CD and DVD and in theaters in a handful of big cities-is the music I grew up on: late '60s and early '70s rock.Or, more precisely, music that today would be called alt-rock or roots rock, categories that the Band almost single-handedly invented.

Charles Frazier is one of those writers who move by instinct, and he's learned to bide his time. It's been five years since he published the best-selling, critically acclaimed Civil War novel "Cold Mountain," and since then he's been prospecting in library stacks, researching his next book. "I take a lot of notes," he told NEWSWEEK in an exclusive interview. "I write sketches.

In 1967, an off-Broadway play called "MacBird" by Barbara Garson had a lot of nasty fun by retelling "Macbeth" as the story of President Lyndon Johnson. This not very subtle satire suggested that Johnson engineered the assassination of John F.

Peter Becker is president of the Criterion Collection, a 17-year-old company that has specialized in high-quality laser disc and DVD versions of classic and contemporary films.

I can't remember when I first got hooked on the commentary tracks that accompany some DVDs. I do know when I recognized that it was time to pull back a bit.

So why does a 33-year-old Englishman decide to write a slam-bang adventure novel that's also an intricate literary puzzle about a 20-year-old Japanese man searching for his long-lost father in Tokyo?

Several years ago, in the course of interviewing the author Frank McCourt, I asked him to name some of his favorite writers. One of those he mentioned was P.

In the first lines of "The Lessons of Terror," Caleb Carr comes out roaring: "To be emblematic of our age is to bear an evil burden. The 20th century, scarcely finished, will be remembered as much for its succession of wars and genocides as it will for anything else," and thereafter he rarely strays from that Hobbesian note.

I still remember the extraordinary rush of liberation I felt as a teenager after reading Mark Twain's terse "Notice" at the beginning of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn": "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Before this, I labored under the impression that a book, to be any good, had to cough up the secret of life, or something close.

Alexandra Fuller grew up in Africa on the losing side. She was a little girl in the '70s in what was then Rhodesia. Her parents, white English emigre farmers, supported white rule in the middle of a revolution that went the other way.

Since September 11, Americans have tried to get on with their lives in one fashion or another. I don't know how other people managed it, if they have, but speaking for myself, it hasn't been easy.

As a more observant fan could have told you long ago, oranges are everywhere in Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece. Don Corleone is buying oranges when he gets shot in Little Italy.

In "Austerlitz," W. G. Sebald performs a small but significant miracle: he wrests the Holocaust out of the clutches of stale cliche. He does this without ever showing us a death camp or a gas chamber.

In four genre-bending works of fiction--"Vertigo," "The Emigrants," "The Rings of Saturn" and "Austerlitz"--published in the last decade, 57-year-old W. G.

Literary oddsmakers were caught short last week with the announcement that V. S. Naipaul had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sir Vidia has long been thought unofficially ineligible, not least because of the rudeness and thorough-going political incorrectness of his opinions.

Literary oddsmakers were caught short this week with the announcement that V.S. Naipaul had won the Nobel prize for literature. Sir Vidia has long been thought at least unofficially ineligible, not because he isn't talented; his talent has never been in dispute.

Since Sept. 11, there have been numerous announcements of "instant" or quickie books related to the bombings at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Random House plans to publish a history of terrorism by Caleb Carr in November.

Reading Jonathan Franzen's much ballyhooed new novel, "The Corrections," turns out to be a lot like those long holiday weekends where you go home with your college roommate and then sit around watching his family fight the whole time.

In the middle of a 20-city book tour, E. Lynn Harris is getting just a mite frayed. At the Shrine of the Black Madonna bookstore in Atlanta, he has read from his new best seller, "Any Way the Wind Blows," his seventh novel full of racy bisexual romance.

One morning in July 1898, when he was just 20 months old, Buster Keaton got his right index finger crushed when he stuck his hand in a clothes wringer out back of the boardinghouse where he was staying with his parents, who were vaudeville troupers.

John Lee Hooker's first instrument was a set of "strings" made from strips of inner tube nailed to a barn wall. From there he soon graduated to a guitar, but the rawness--and the ingenuity--of that first instrument remained a part of this bluesman's music all his life.