To the Max

My latest Astral Weeks column looks at the longer short fiction of Howard Waldrop:

So, for instance, in "You Could Go Home Again," Waldrop's not content to imagine, with great empathy, what Thomas Wolfe might have written to Max Perkins, his old editor, had Wolfe not died at 37. No. Instead, Waldrop's Wolfe listens gleefully to the banter of Fats Waller ("That's the charm of music, the Hegemony of Harmony, the Triumph of Terpsichore, and other melodious metaphors"). Not only that, they're cruising from Japan to Germany.

On a zeppelin.

With J.D. Salinger as social director.