Recent work and news:
"Manet and Degas and Robert and Me"
"MAGIC: The Life of Earvin 'Magic' Johnson"
"A writer apologized to me - 23 years later. A 'waterfall' of memories ensued"
"The Sullivanians"
"On Outscoring My Father"
"A Sense of Where He's Been"
"Ugly Donald, From Queens"
"Pandemic Playgrounds"
"A Few Words About Jerry Stiller"
"The joys and heartbreak of my 20-year friendship with poet-songwriter David Berman
"
"J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist" wins
"The N.B.A. Kaleidescope"
"Wearing the Lead Glasses:
"The Shot That Stoped Basketball"
"Hurricane Bernie"
"James Harden's Transcendant Step-back"
"The Death of a Movie Theater"
"A Capacious New History of the Beastie Boys
"Gathering Moss: A Decade in New Orleans"
"The Vanished Music Stores of
"Here We Go Again:
"Loitering Backstage at the N.B.A"
"Anthony Davis and the Plight of
"Somebody's Mother is Waiting in the Lobby"
"The Egg Cream in Mid-Manhattan"
"The Devastating Shutdown of the Cambodia Daily"
"The Electric-Bike Conundrum"
"The Fight From Saigon"
"Frank Ntilikina and French Math At The NBA Draft"
"Ruth Negga"
"The Warrior's Torrential Victory"
"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds: Childhood"
"Reviews of work by Dawn DeDeaux, Tom Lowenstein, Philip Roth, Gregory Pardlo on 4columns.com"
"The Pleasures of The Old Man Game"
"There's Nowhere To Hide On The Internet"
"Maybe The Earth Is Flat If You Are Kyrie Irving"
"A New Orleans All-Star Game Diary #2:
"A New Orleans All-Star Game Diary #1"
"Alexander Chancellor's Laugh"
"First Snow"
"America's First Climate Refugees"
"Don Delillo and Move-In Day"
"Holiday Travel"
"That Time My Band Opened for Blur"
"'Gimme Shelter' in Central Park"
"Angola Prison and the Shadow of Slavery"
"The City Game?"
"'The Loved Ones'"
"The Menace in Our Own Backyard"
"Don't Call It Katrina"
The book is a clue:
"Two Readings with Robert Stone"
"The Expatriate Knicks Fan"
"Napoleon on the Backstairs"
The New York Times Book Review: The New York Times interview.
The Bookforum interview.
Reading
and discussion with Edmund White and Patricia Bosworth: June 5th at the
92nd St Y, New York. "Her Party"
Radio/Podcast: An interview with Susan Larson (on New Orleans Public Radio, WWNO), with Janet Coleman on WBAI's Cat Radio, with Pat Towers, on Robin Hood Radio, "the smallest NPR Station in the nation."
The New Yorker's Page Turner:"Books to Look Out For in June." New York Magazine's Vulture: "8 Books You Need to Read in June," The Los Angeles Times: Summer Books Preview, 2014.
"J.D.
Salinger: The Escape Artist" is available at your local bookstore and these venues: Amazon, Powell's, Indiebound,
"The All-Star Game Diaries"
Book Review: A Port In The Storm "Nirvana For two Year Olds" "Generation Crossfit " "The Perils of Precocity" "The Lady Upstairs" "Repeat, Memory" "Excerpt from 'A Symposium on Psychoanalysis' by Thomas
Beller, "The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing" Discussing The Onging Story on:
"The Mother of All Frequencies or: A Tweet Not Tweeted" "'Both Flesh and Not' by David Foster Wallace: Review" "Remembrance of Snows Past" "Icebreaker" "River of Berman" "Saying Goodbye To Now" "My Thanksgiving Panic" "Parking: The Agonies and the Ecstasies" "The Two Thousand Dollar Popsicle" New Orleans' problem with lead
paint and kids.
Central Park "The Mollification of Manhattan" "Thomas Beller Needs to Take Better Care of His Things" "How I Lost My iPhone in New Orleans, or Some New
Adventures of Huck Finn" "Spree" "In Between Days" "The Purple Krama" "An Exile from the Kingdom of Me" "Negative Space" "Saigon on the Bayou" "The Topographical Soul" Reading Nicolo Tucci's "The Evolution of Knowledge,"
"Us and Them" "The Laundry Room" Said Sayrafiezadeh reads Thomas Beller's "A Different Kind of Imperfection," and discusses it with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.
"The Maserati Kid" "On Steve Jobs" "Stalking The Stalkers" They're at It Again: Stories from
Twenty Years of Open City "'On Abundance,'" "The closing of H&H Bagels on 80th Street and Broadway
sparked a surge of interest into that institution, some of which found its
way to 'Portrait of The Bagel As A Young Man," collected in 'How To Be a
Man." "Open City's Closing: 20 years, 30 Issues and 'Life Pressed
Into' The Pages" |
***
"Touching and often funny... graced by elegant turns of phrase, a fresh way with metaphor and real insight. Brilliantly captures the great expectations and recurring ambivalence of youth." -- New York Times Book Review "A touching collection of stories about love in the city... (an) exceptionally memorable... spirited collection." -- Time Magazine ***
A New York Times Notable Book. A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2000.
"Captures perfectly the myriad stages of fear, discovery and elation that mark one's first sexual experience... Beller paints a hauntingly accurate portrait of a love affair laced with grown-up complications."
"Hits a pitch of anguish so leavened by humour as to keep the reader off guard in a satisfying if disturbing way."
"Beller is a master of the profound and fatal flaw... poetry is everywhere."
"Smart and funny. Beller has an admirable eye for detail, and a cutting observational wit."
"A frank, likeable book with an appealing central character."
"Beller is writing in a genre - the guy-coming-of-age - that has been around for a while. But in his modest way he changes the rules."
"Featuring a New York that, like Kundera's Prague, is a vast hive of seductions and betrayals, Beller's carefully crafted debut novel charts the coming-of-age of Alex Fader.... Beller has the true novelist's knack for weaving together the disparate threads of postmodern urban existence into convincing studies of character. The vignettes of Alex's life coalesce into a moving portrait of a young man intuitively seeking a place he can call home."
"Fresh, sophisticated, and most of all utterly readable."
How
To Be a Man: "Smart,
funny, interesting..." "Beller
can write his butt off." "A
supremely enjoyable collection of essays written in clear, often
very
funny prose." "Not
since I first read Joseph Mitchell have I felt so vividly and
beautifully
transported to the streets of New York. Thomas Beller is a
chronicler
of his own life but also of the life of the city, and there's a
quality
of unbridled curiosity to his work
which
make his essays shimmer with comedy and insight and exuberance. I
absolutely
loved this book." "The
best sections of his book . . . call to mind Raymond Carver in
their clarity
of language and subdued emotion. A fine collection of essays that
will
resonate with many." "Elegant
descriptions and sophisticated insights that evince the hipness
you expect
from a lifelong New Yorker and a sweetness and intimacy you might
not." "An
enjoyably mature read." "
Beller's smooth prose and insightful analyses will appeal to fans
of good
writing everywhere." "Doesn't
show how to be a man so much as a mensch." "These
quite marvelous and darkly hilarious personal essays derive their
power
from a shameless honesty, often about the most shameful moments,
which
suddenly reveal a luminous upside in the author's comic retelling.
Together
they give us a privileged view of how curiously attenuated and
winding,
for many a young American male, is the long march to
maturity." "Each
meticulous sentence is a crooked finger that lures the reader
deeper into
his darkly funny world."
Editors' Choice: New York Times Book Review, Amazon.com
Table of Contents
Manhattan Ate My Car (read) The Costume Party Mother Goes to Hollywood (read) Chemistry Set The Drummer The Birthday Suit Portrait Of The Bagel As AYoung Man The Problem with T-Shirts A Biker in the City Turtles In New York The Breakup The Tryout Addicted To Love The Last Days of Shakespeare & Company Scenes From a Playground A Bike Messenger in the City Strip Club A Car Is Not A Castle Walking The Dog The Floating Armoire
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