Brendan Bernhard

Photo by Debra DiPaolo It’s fun listening to Salman Rushdie discuss his new novel, Fury, over lunch at Campanile, but he’d have to be a mesmerist to make me like the book. We meet upstairs in one of the restaurant’s private rooms, safely secluded from the lunch-time crowd. It is......

Courtesy of the Bridgeman Art LibraryIt has been said that if the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) had not existed, Jorge Luis Borges would have been obliged to invent him. No less an authority than George Steiner has suggested that March 8, 1914, the day Pessoa composed some 30-odd poems......

Ryan Bingham, the 35-year-old protagonist of Walter Kirn‘s latest novel, Up in the Air, is a corporate consultant whose life is spent in airplanes, airports, rental cars and hotel rooms that look exactly the same no matter what city he happens to find himself in. He doesn’t have a home......

I bumped into James Wolcott two blocks before I reached Canteen, the cavernous Manhattan restaurant in which we had arranged to meet. Dressed in a striped cotton shirt, wrinkled khakis and a red L.L. Bean jacket, the most feared critic in America was shuffling along the street under a plus-size......

I’ve always had a knack for spotting celebrities. I inherited it from my mother. In London, where I grew up in the 1970s, every time she’d come home from a walk or a trip to the supermarket, she’d say, “Guess who I saw?” And I’d say, “I don’t know, mother,......

I’ve always had a knack for spotting celebrities. I inherited it from my mother. In London, where I grew up in the 1970s, every time she‘d come home from a walk or a trip to the supermarket, she’d say, “Guess who I saw?” And I‘d say, “I don’t know, mother,......