SWITCH: Mobile | ePaper | Subscribe

Homes Rentals Jobs Autos Contests

Two children found dead in West Point home suffered stab wounds

David L. Ulin

Toni Morrison's 'Home' a veteran's unfelt return

David L. Ulin Los Angeles Times

Last updated Sunday, May 13, 2012 - 7:45am

"HOME." By Toni Morrison. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

I've long admired Toni Morrison as a moral visionary, but her fiction, not so much. Of her nine novels, three -- "Song of Solomon" (1977), "Beloved" (1987) and 2008's "A Mercy" -- are masterpieces, yet the others, particularly the post-Nobel books "Paradise" (1997) and "Love" (2003) can be so stylized as to veer dangerously close to self-parody. Anyone who's read her in any depth may understand what I'm referring to: those stentorian rhythms, the biblical cadences, the characters who function more as archetypes than flesh-and-blood.

Features, Books, Home, Korean War, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Toni Morrison Read more Comments

David Treuer has unique perspective about reservation life in 'Rez Life'

David L. Ulin Los Angeles Times

Last updated Sunday, April 22, 2012 - 7:27am

David Treuer never planned on writing nonfiction. "I was happy working on my novels," the fiction writer and University of Southern California professor says over the phone from Ann Arbor, where he is visiting the University of Michigan to talk about his new book, "Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life" (Grove, $26).

Features, American Indians, Books, David Treuer, Jews, Memoirs, Reservation, Rez Life Read more Comments

Best books of 2011 compelled, reshaped worldview

David L. Ulin Los Angeles Times

Last updated Sunday, January 1, 2012 - 8:57am

Of all the books I read this year, here -- alphabetically by title -- are my 10 favorites, those that most stuck with me, that reframed how I think about the world.

Features, 2011, Books, Year in Review Read more Comments

'On the Road' book app a road trip and map to the future

David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times McClatchy Newspapers

Last updated Sunday, July 3, 2011 - 1:06pm

There's a certain poetic justice in the fact that "On the Road" is one of Apple's top-grossing book apps. Released last month, the iPad app for Jack Kerouac's landmark novel -- featuring a variety of enriched content, including commentary, maps, audio recordings and other ephemera -- hit No. 4 on Apple's list June 21, ahead of the Bible and T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." That's a testament to the power of the digital project, but also to the novel, which has occupied a visionary place in the culture since it was first published in 1957. (The novel has been adapted for a new movie directed by Walter Salles and starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart.)

Features, Apps, Books Read more Comments

Metaphors, mysteries abound in 'The Tiger's Wife'

David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

Last updated Monday, April 4, 2011 - 11:40am

"THE TIGER'S WIFE." By. Tea Obreht. Random House. $25.

Here's what I like about Tea Obreht's debut novel, "The Tiger's Wife": Obreht can write. She can put a sentence together, inhabit characters with lives far different than hers; she can trace the horrors of a war she's never seen.

All that is essential, for "The Tiger's Wife" is, after a fashion, a war novel -- it takes place after the collapse of communism in an unnamed Eastern European country that has suffered a bloody civil war.

Features, Best-sellers, Books Read more Comments

Jim thinks Huck is a ghost in E. W. Kemble’s illustration in the original edition of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Word changes hinder 'Huckleberry Finn'

David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

Last updated Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - 2:26pm

Here we go again: This week, NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Montgomery, Ala., announced plans to release an omnibus edition of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" with a couple of offensive words removed. Most prominent, of course, is "nigger," which appears 219 times in "Huckleberry Finn" and has been the source of repeated efforts to ban or restrict the novel since it was published 125 years ago. In this new edition, the word in question has been replaced by "slave."

Features, Books Read more Comments

'Doonesbury' still compelling at 40

David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

Last updated Sunday, December 12, 2010 - 2:42am

It's been years since I thought about -- really thought about -- "Doonesbury," Garry Trudeau's Russian novel of a comic strip, in which dozens of characters loop in and out of one another's orbits, sketching a portrait of their times. I was, for many years, a devoted reader, but somewhere in the 1990s my attention began to drift. Mostly, I suppose, this has to do with the contempt of familiarity; with 40 years' of strips (more than 14,000 of them) in circulation, "Doonesbury" seems to have been with us always, a staple of the newspaper comics page, no longer new or surprising, as easy to take for granted as reruns of "Peanuts" or "B.C."

Features, Books, Doonesbury Read more Comments