brendanowicz's review against another edition

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4.0

Fancy that, a talking stag! Wolcott on Lit > TV > Rock > Film. The density of later publications made me a bit wistful for the length restrictions of his Voice/Texas Monthly reviews, but that's a shallow complaint when we're dealing with prose as fine-woven as this. Favorite tendency is his fondness for a parenthetical gag after quoting an author - the opening fragment here following a ludicrous love scene out of Mailer. The closing Lena Dunham essay from TNR was, I think, my real introduction to Wolcott and spurred this impromptu purchase. It's not his best work, but it's a fitting end note; in applying his style to a Millennial celebrity like Dunham, a descendant of the New York arts scene that so sculpted Wolcott's sensibility, he's able to expose how meandering most of the discourse about her work really is, and gets off plenty of jabs at the right targets along the way.
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