“I think of America as my audience, and inside that space are white people as well as people of color.”

Given that we’re living in a Terry Southern novel, perhaps there’s no better time than now to revisit his trenchant, sidesplitting work.

  One evening not long ago, my fifteen-year-old son, Noah, told me that literature was dead. We were at the dinner table, discussing The Great Gatsby, which he was reading for a ninth-grade humanities class. Part of the class structure involved anno…

There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. —Red Smith I I wrote my first first book over the course of three months, from July 23 to October 23, 1979. Four weeks in, I turned eighteen. This was a novel…