Hi. I've always been a big fan of Brother Don's. I enjoyed his earlier books but something happened to him when White Noise came out in 1985. He just got exponentially better, I think at being able to elucidate the buckshot of information that is the America of the last 30 plus years. Some of his work was downright prophetic. Read Mao II or Underworld, think about when they appeared on the scene and then look at the life America has been having, enduring since 9/11. I get this sort of feeling with him-a sort of he's right under your fingernails feeling. He brings a shape and scope to the world of abject confusion, the blur world we live in.

I just read that David Cronenberg has made a film version of the very wonderful darkly comic novel Cosmopolis. Interested to see if he does it any justice. I mean, how do you handle coming upon the funeral of a Sufi rap artist on the way to get a haircut?

I'd read all of the books I just mentioned and Falling Man. His most recent book is a book of stories that is very entertaining in spots but Don is a novelist. He needs vistas for him to get up to the speed he works best in.

If you're not sure about him--read the opening section of Mao II (set at the Moony mass wedding that happened at Yankee Stadium in '78, I think) and the opening of Underworld which takes place at the "shot heard around the world" game which features folks like Bobby Thomson and Leo Durocher but also Sinatra, Gleason, Toots Shor and a toady named J. Edgar. It's some of the best baseball writing ever--but it's much more too.