There once was a boy who loved candles. He liked to burn them in his bedroom and bathroom and sometimes in the basement. Fire fascinated him, but it scared him too, and he feared to extinguish the flames in the proper manner; by wetting his thumb and forefinger and pinching the wick after blowing them […]

Managed to crawl on my belly through the ghastly trenches of the last hundred pages of “Officers and Gentlemen” over the weekend. What a dreadful, conflicted, nonsensical read! To triangulate the novel’s problems: it portrays the mentally-unstable absurdities of war in a stiff, dry manner that shows pathetically when placed next to Heller’s brilliant depiction […]