David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (the most compelling piece of fiction I've read in donkey's years, a book that practically teaches you how to re-vision fiction as you read it)

 

Richard Powers' brilliant new novel, Generosity: an Enhancement

 

Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist.

 

Peter Cameron's Andorra

 

E. L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley.

 

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell.

 

Don DeLillo's Point Omega.

 

Updike's (sniff) last book of stories, My Father's Tears and Other Stories.

 

Frederick Barthelme's Waveland.

 

The Acceptance World: the third book, and At Lady Molly's, the fourth book in Anthony Powell's monumental 12-novel cycle, Dance to the Music of Time. Beautiful.

 

Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado. Very wry.

 

Amy Hempel's At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom.

 

The late (I can almost not accept that) John Updike's The Widows of Eastwick.

 

John McGahern's Amongst Women (he is so fine.)

 

Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider

 

The Essential Tales of Chekhov (I sheepishly admit this is the first time I'd read Chekhov....he's a pretty good writer.)

 

 

Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

 

James Sallis' Bluebottle (he is always good and this is one of his best)

 

 

R. M. Koster's delightfullly ultra-literary Carmichael's Dog.

 

Ian Hamilton's In Search of J. D. Salinger. (What to write when you can't write the biography.)

 

Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square. (He should be more widely read.)

 

Selah Saterstrom's remarkable The Meat and Spirit Plan.

 

Remainder, Tom McCarthy's amazing first novel.

 

Toni Morrison's A Mercy.

 

Greil Marcus' Mystery Train.

 

Cary Holladay's delightful novella, A Fight in the Doctor's Office.

 

Peter Cameron's wondrous, The City of Your Final Destination.

 

Megan Abbott's wonderful noir Queenpin.

 

Francine Prose's Blue Angel.

 

My buddy Steve Stern's marvelous novella The North of God.

 

Steve Erickson's Zeroville (may be the best Hollywood novel since Day of the Locust)

 

Dave Egger's You Shall Know Our Velocity.

 

Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land.

 

Peter Ackroyd's The Fall of Troy.

 

Georges Simenon's Dirty Snow.

 

Charles McCarry's The Secret Lovers.

 

Walter Kirn's Thumbsucker.

 

Steven Millhauser's Dangerous Laughter.

 

Morley Callaghan's A Fine and Private Place. Why isn't he more widely known?

 

Greil Marcus' Mystery Train.

 

Ben Tanzer's singular Lucky Man. A wonderful funny-sad bildungsroman about 4 guys trying to become adults.  And Ben's Most Likely You Go Your Way and I Go Mine.

 

John Williams' Stoner. A truly beautiful, neglected classic.

 

Charles McCarry's latest, Christopher's Ghosts (he's better than LeCarre, he really is)

 

Richard Matheson's The Incredible Shrinking Man. Mattheson's best book and one that can be put alongside Verne and Wells. It's that good.

 

I know I am last to the table on this, but I just read East of Eden. What a glorious story! Steinbeck is best when he thinks Big.

 

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen (on paper he's still the funniest man alive)

 

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (I did too read it all....all 1080 glorious, word-drunk pages of it, a towering achievement, a grand epic of invention and inventiveness and puredee sentence for sentence the best prose on the planet.)

 

Walter Kirn's Up in the Air

 

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

 

Louis Begley's Shipwreck (an elegant, unjustly ignored modern master)

 

Warren Zanes' Dusty in Memphis (a wonderful little exegesis, not only about this glorious album, but about soul music, Dusty Springfield, the South and where music comes from, written in a sharp, smart style.) Also, other fine studies in this wonderful 33 1/3 series: Kevin Courrier's Trout Mask Replica, Franklin Bruno's Armed Forces, Mark Polizzotti's Highway 61 Revisited (actually one of the best books on Dylan I've read.)

 

Jonathan Baumbach's B: A Novel

 

Charles Baxter's First Light

 

William Gaddis' The Recognitions (what a whopper....to borrow phrasing from Pauline Kael, it makes most other modern novels look like something on the end of a toothpick.)

 

Jacques Prevert's Paroles

 

Contemporary East European Poetry ed. by Emery George

 

Raymond Queneau's whacked-out Exercises in Style

 

Diane Johnson's marvelous bio of Dashiell Hammett

 

Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People (dag, hes' funny)

 

Muriel Spark's The Finishing School (a perfect novel, in its own small, quiet way)

 

Norman Mailer's Marilyn

 

The crime novels of Ross McDonald, who is every bit as good as Chandler and Hammett but doesn't, for whatever reason, get the same attention. Just finished The Blue Hammer, which is both complex and poetic.

 

Patrick McGinley's wonderful novels which inexplicably are neglected and all out of print. If you can ferret out a copy of The Trick of the Ga Bolga you will thank me for this note.

 

Bob Dylan's Chronicles Volume One (well, you know how I feel about Mr. D)

 

 

Nick Tosches' Hellfire

 

 

The best movie I've seen since, um, Black Narcissus: Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows. I love all his films but this is his best and the new print they've recently released is gorgeous.

 

 

 

Playtime. A mind-expanding movie. Tati was a genius.

 

 

The amazing Up. Pixar's best movie since the first Toy Story.

 

The almost equally amazing 9.

 

Also, been watching a bunch of Robert Bresson movies. Good stuff.

 

All Night Long, a marvelous jazz version of Othello, with a slimy Patrick McGoohan, and cameos by musicians like Dave Brubeck and Charlie Mingus. One of the best jazz movies ever....and it's not available on DVD in the US.

 

 

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. For my money, better than The Reader.

 

Nothing but the Truth: a newspaper drama, very well done, shot in Memphis, and starring the resplendent Kate Beckinsale.

 

Becker's Le Trou.

 

Blues in the Night, a great little jazz noir (and maybe the only film that can be so labeled.)

 

Haneke's The Castle (might be the best Kafka on film.)

 

Tarsem's The Fall.

 

Wendy and Lucy: a woman and her dog. Michelle Williams is great.

 

Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh's brave look at the difficulty of being, well, happy.

 

Religulous. Bill Maher is very very funny.

 

The astonishing, moving Nothing But a Man.

 

Ira Sach's beautiful Married Life.

 

Konchalovsky's wondrous House of Fools.

 

The Devil and Daniel Webster (great old fantasy flick with Walter Huston as Scratch.

 

The Coen Brothers' return to glory No Country for Old Men. And their Burn after Reading.

 

The Spirit of the Beehive (this is such a beautiful film....it's really unlike anything else I've seen)

 

The best new movie I've seen in a while, Haneke's remake of his own German thriller, Funny Games, with Naomi Watts.

 

Green for Danger. A neglected British who-dun-it.

 

Ozu's Tokyo Story. Subtle, stunning.

 

Breakfast on Pluto, Starting out in the Evening, The Fifth Horseman is Fear, May Fools (Malle), Sleepwalking, Cassandra's Dream, I'm Not Afraid, Lars and the Real Girl.

 

Waitress (totally beguiling, featuring a completely winning performance by Keri Russell....an utter tragedy that Shelly would concoct such a life-affirming movie only to die before ever seeing it released)

 

Malpertuis. This is one whacked-out horror film, a sort of Gormenghast meets Hammer concoction. Anyone else seen this and wanna talk about it?

 

Plan 10 from Outer Space (Because it has the luminous Stefene Russell in it, that's why.)

 

Cloverfield. The best monster movie in years.

 

 

Darjeeling Limited. (I think this is Anderson's best film.)

 

 

Christmas in July, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Once, Les Infants Terribles, Blithe Spirit (what I watched over the holidays)

 

Tom Tykwer's Perfume: such a great novel, seemingly unfilmable, made into such a great movie, by the wonderful director of Run, Lola, Run.

 

Ossessione (Visconti's first film, a version of The Postman Always Rings Twice that surpasses every other version)

 

Fay Grim (the great Hal Hartley)

 

Who Gets to Call it Art: a fine documentary about the New York art scene, circa the 1960s

 

The Oh in Ohio (the resplendent Parker Posey....and if anyone can get me an introduction to Mischa Barton I'll give them my signed Zora Neale Hurston first edition copy of Tell My Horse)

 

And the 3rd Bourne movie. Say what you will this trilogy works as one long smart action film. An amnesiac's trip back to his parentage.

 

Antonioni's L'eclisse

 

Captain Beefheart: Under Review (great, strange documentary about the great, strange Don Van Vliet)

 

Play it as is Lays (Tuesday Weld is luminous)

 

Tell Them Who You Are (Mark Wexler's documentary about his dad, the director/cinematographer/radical)

 

Rapture (a wonderful, neglected classic, starring Melvin Douglas and a startling Patricia Gozzi)

 

Port of Shadows (Marcel Carne)

 

Sketches of Frank Gehry (Yeah, I didn't care about architecture going in either)

 

Valmont (doesn't have the deliriously wicked Malkovich, which the other version does, but has a very sexy 15 year old Fairuza Balk and the wonderful Annette Bening)

 

Shopgirl (Steve Martin) Surprisingly tender and surprisingly beautifully made.

 

Black Narcissus (This is just about the best movie I've seen in a long long time, and I think Powell/Pressburger's best film.)

 

William Eggleston in the Real World (fascinating and sad, esp if you knew Leigh Haizlip)

 

Bright Young Things (a simply dead-on version of Waugh's Vile Bodies...may I publicly profess my love for Emily Mortimer?)

 

Grey Gardens (has anyone else seen this very curious document? it made me squirm...maybe in a good way)

 

 

Corey's unrecommendations (movies that make you say blech):

 

Tarantino's and Rodriguez's Grindhouse films. Someone take the cameras away from these guys until they grow up.

 

Get Smart. If you make a movie based on a comedy TV series you should try to make it, you know, funny.

 

Bad News Bears (what was Richard Linklater thinking? this is only marginally better than Billy Bob's execrable Bad Santa)

 

The Pink Panther (Steve Martin version--Oh my God, is this really that bad? Yes it is!)

 

The Holiday (Jude Law should know better; Cameron Diaz, well, you don't expect her to know better)

 

Failure to Launch (a concept so ricekty they can't even stick to it....and such a lifeless execution [now, there's a nice turn of phrase])

 

Four Brothers (just in case you thought Singleton was a better director than his protege Craig Brewer)

 

Firewall (a stupid thriller from the same doofus who directed the stupid love story Wimbledon)

 

Syriana (an important movie that's a little confusing....I never did figure out what Jeffrey Wright was doing)

 

Freedomland (why is this movie so bad and the good actors in it so artificial?)

 

Little Black Book (here's my confession: I have the hots for Brittany Murphy and her lack of talent diminishes it not)

 

Elizabethtown (bad even if you go in with low expectations)

 

Silent Hill. I love Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean, but this horror movie tries too hard and, in the end, is ridiculous. No surprise, really, it's a "story" based on a video game.

 

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: an updating of Forrest Gump, like we wanted that. Curiously boring.