BOOK COLLECTOR

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 365 pages, $16 2011 NBCCA Non-fiction finalist After reading Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s most recent & superb collection of essays, it’s easy to see why critics lionize him. NPR reviewer, Dan Kois refers to this collection as “among the liveliest magazine features written by anyone in the past 10 years”. So, it should come as no surprise that he garnered  the auspicious guest editor role for The Best American Essays 2014 . In the last decade, Sullivan’s work has frequently appeared in GQ , Harper’s , New York Times Magazine , and Oxford American --to name a few. Most of the fourteen essays in Pulphead have appeared in revised versions elsewhere but having them together in one collection feels like an extra special treat.  Read a couple of Sullivan’s essays and you'll see that he's a writer of tactical reversals & coy suspense, of candid admissions and genial first-person presence, of ad