Among The Jumbled Heap

Gin Phillips, Hawthorne Books, Book Objects:

Barnes and Noble Gets It Right. My friend Anthony is--to put it mildly--a bookslut.    The type of fellow who has so many books that when he buys more, he has to hid them from his wife because she'll get mad.   (That's Gin Phillips to the right, though, not Anthony.  More on her ins a minute.) Not content with mere collecting, Anthony has turned his addiction into an admirable scholarly pursuit.  His research focuses not on the content of books as much as human interaction with books.  How we f...

Ha Jin Redux

My first voyage into the storied world of Ha Jin was his Ocean of Words. I was not impressed. I found it to be truly an ocean of words, lacking that economy of language I expect in contemporary American fiction (Stephanie Meyer excluded). My major beef with Ha was that he was boring, conventional, afraid to take the risks that other Chinese writers (those in the mainland of China) were taking par for the course. Folks like Mo Yan and Yu Hua who contrive wild stories full of improbabilities...