Nat Tate

The marvelous Scottish novelist William Boyd (A Good Man in Africa; Brazzaville Beach; Any Human Heart) here invents an artist and chronicles his entire life and career in a magnificent hoax of a book, which skewers the pretensions of the art world in a manner more ingenious than Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word. Delightfully clever and wonderfully engaging.

May 23: Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow died on this day in 1934, gunned down in a police ambush on a road in the north Louisiana woods. The Barrow Gang's crime spree was short and small time, but the young "celebrity bandits" were…

Ethan Rutherford and Matt Burgess (Dogfight: A Love Story) on the writing of Rutherford's surreal and fiercely funny story collection The Peripatetic Coffin

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