selected Essays

The Great Late Yeats 2023.

Medical advances: How F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nurse inspired a fictional romance 2022.

Take Me Back to Tulsa: The Bob Dylan Archive is Open 2022.

Rough and Rowdy Ways by Bob Dylan: A Record We Need Right Now 2020.

Robbie Robertson and The Band: Brothers Where Art Thou? 2019.

Conjuring The Rolling Thunder Re-Vue: Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese 2019.

Rolling Thunder Re-vue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese 2019.

There Will Be Blood: Bob Dylan’s “Blood On The Tracks” Notebooks 2018.

Last Night With Dylan and McPherson in the North Country 2018.

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture: Heard Melodies Are Sweet 2017.

"Keep It Goin’" In Levon Helm’s Barn, a Legacy of Rambles 2017.

Bob Dylan, "Shadows In The Night." 2015. Rudy Vallee, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan. Dylan carries the flame for torch singers on his grand new album.

David Tennant, Shakespeare, and Richard II 2014.

Peaches and Scottie Go to Hollywood, 1938 2014.

Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, 1927, as drawn by Zelda 2012.

Lost in Translation: Oscar, Bosie, and Salome 2007. Oscar Wilde's Salome in French and English

Dylan at Doubleday 2006. Bob Dylan and baseball in Cooperstown, NY

Arthur Symons and "The Savoy." 2005.

articles I most loved writing

Bob Dylan and Basement Tapes Old and New, 2014.

Bob Dylan, Tempest Dylan's latest songs of innocence and of experience, 2012.

In The Waste Land of Your Mind: High Modernism Out On Highway 61, 2010.

Songs That Matter: The Band, "The Weight" (1968) 

Modern Times: Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby, 2013.

"Revisionist Art," 2012.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, and GATZ onstage in Princeton, 2011

Liam Clancy's farewell to New YorkThe Irish Echo, January 5, 2010

The Last Words Scott Fitzgerald Ever Wrote, 2004.

The Asia Series: Impressions,” 2011. 

“Lyrical Ballads: Bob Dylan Plays Lost and Found in a Border Town,” 2009.

“Pilgrim On Tinker Street: Desperately Seeking Dylan at the Woodstock Film Festival,” 2007.

a few Book chapters

Tempest, Bob Dylan and the Bardic Arts,” in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century (Mississippi 2017).

“'The ladies would say that he looked like a poet’: Tom and the Selling of Louis,” in Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy (Carcanet 2012).

“Yeats and Women,” in Visions and Revisions: Irish Writers in their Time: W.B. Yeats (Belfast 2010).

“Homecoming: Yeats and Sligo,” in Yeats 150: William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939 (Lilliput 2009).

"Philip Roth, MVP" Three early-70s novels of Roth’s reread from the collection, Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Praegar, 2005).

"'Crushed again!'" – Wilde the Writer," in Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick Roden (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

"'Blue as the sky, gentlemen': Fitzgerald's Princeton Through The Prince," in F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 21st Century, ed. Jackson Bryer and Ruth Prigozy (University of Alabama Press, 2002).

enjoyable MEdia

Wide-ranging talks with Paul Metsa for Wall of Power Radio Hour, 2020.

Definitely Dylan, with Laura Tenschert, “Bob Dylan and Women,” March 2018.

BBC Radio 4, Open Book with Mariella Frostrup, May 2013.

NPR's On Point: "The Great Gatsby" with Jay McInerney, and A.O. Scott, 2013.

Leonard Lopate's Book Club / BBC World Book Club, "The Great Gatsby," May 6, 2013 

“Sincerely, F. Scott Fitzgerald,” BBC, 2013.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton,” Princeton Alumni Association Great Authors, 2004.

NOTES

A note on redheaded singers, real or not, in The New York Times

Regular Columns

Book reviews for The Spectator

See also articles and essays from years past at No Depression and The Huffington Post