Dwight Garner

1 week ago | nytimes.com | Dwight Garner

Keith McNally tracks his staggering successes - and failures - in his new memoir, "I Regret Almost Everything."When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING, by Keith McNallyThe restaurateur Keith McNally's memoir, "I Regret Almost Everything," is driven by his dislikes, as so many good books are. He loathes two of the first three words in the sentence above, for example.

2 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Dwight Garner

1 hour agoWe tend to think of popes as people who are somehow elevated from the rest of us — a few steps up the ladder leading to God, perhaps. But Pope Francis, whose birth name was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was often thinking of the common citizen, as heard in his comments about migrants, refugees and people …

2 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Dwight Garner

"Seductive Reasoning," a flop that preceded the Roches' debut, has a fluctuating sonic palette, contributions from Paul Simon and the sisters' most brilliant songwriting. "It's funny how one always wants to play their favorite records for friends, and they never listen properly, never understand them," Patricia Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1943. Many of us have albums like that, orphaned ones we shyly push on others to little or no avail.

3 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Dwight Garner

El nobel peruano era el novelista político más inteligente y consumado del mundo. Hubo un tiempo, durante el último cuarto del siglo XX, en que era posible argumentar que una sola persona era el mejor novelista y el mejor crítico literario de Estados Unidos. Me refiero a John Updike, cuyas largas y elegantes reseñas en The New Yorker marcaban las agendas de lectura.

3 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Dwight Garner

The Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was the world's savviest and most accomplished political novelist. Once upon a time, during the last quarter of the 20th century, it was possible to argue that one person was America's best novelist and best literary critic. I am talking about John Updike, whose long and elegant reviews in The New Yorker set reading agendas.