Larry McMurtry | The New York Review of Books

What Woody Wrote

On the rediscovered ‘House of Earth’

House of Earth

by Woody Guthrie, edited and introduced by Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp

April 25, 2013 issue

The Star Attraction

Geronimo

by Robert M. Utley

January 10, 2013 issue

A Great Day for Books

September 27, 2012 issue

The Last Book Sale

In a summer when the shoreline temperature in the Little Arkansas River reached 98 degrees—bad news for catfish—should I really have attempted to bring a bunch of citified northerners into the heart of the heat, which peaked locally at 116? Well, yes. It’s just weather, as my popular hero Captain Woodrow Call often said if he heard a complaint. So I threw a book sale. Upward of 300,000 books went on sale in Archer City at public auction, which was conducted by the cracker-jack team of Addison and Sarova out of Macon, Georgia, where I gather the heat is wet rather than dry.

August 17, 2012

A Life for the Star

The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice

by M.G. Lord

April 26, 2012 issue

The Rick Perry Hustle

It’s not been said so I’ll say it: as a politician Rick Perry is fundamentally lazy, so far as actual governing is concerned, content to run things mainly by sound-bite. He makes lots of decisions but lingers on no issue very long; there’s little follow-through.

October 1, 2011

Mixed Pickles in Hollywood

A conversation about the confusions and occasional pleasures of the annual Hollywood awards season.

March 1, 2011

Marilyn

MM—Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe

edited by Lois Banner, with photographs by Mark Anderson

Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters

by Marilyn Monroe, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment

The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe

by Andrew O'Hagan

March 10, 2011 issue

Talking About ‘True Grit’

The story of True Grit is mainly a study of loyalty. Reluctant loyalty, it is true, but loyalty nonetheless.

February 8, 2011

American Tragedy

Murderous rampages of the sort that occurred Saturday outside a grocery store here in Tucson may retain some power to shock—twenty people shot down right up the road from where I write—but for me, at least, they have lost all power to surprise.

January 11, 2011

The Trouble with Arizona

On April 23, Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed into law what is probably the most stringent and least welcoming immigration law in the nation. Its intent is to have all law enforcement agencies in the state—Federal, state, and local—pool their muscle and get illegal immigrants out of the state of Arizona, pronto. Senate Bill 1070 may be cited as the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.” Its passage immediately set off a chorus of indignation.

June 24, 2010