• The Sunday Book Blog Roundup

    Greetings and salutations! I’m Michael Berger, today’s guest-editor.  I’ve spent my last few days off sipping coffee and drifting through the labyrinth of book blogs. Which was terrific, because most of my work week was spent moving a bookstore. Yes,…

  • The Sunday Book Review Supplement

    Now that it’s finally Sunday, it’s time to read a new book. Perhaps you’ve noticed how Sunday parks and bars are full of  blissed-out readers and lovers of the written word? Please take a hint.

  • Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears

    Starting off, I want to thank Jeremy Hatch or subbing in for me last week, both on this column and as Saturday Editor. Great job, dude. Seth Abramson writes a lot about MFA programs and, by extension, the PhD in…

  • A Barricade of Books

    Yiyun Li in The New Yorker: Despite my rudimentary understanding of the language, most evenings, after lights-out, I would sneak away to the platoon storage room, where I could take a leave from my small miseries—the bullying of the officers,…

  • Vogon Poetry

    I dare say I’m not the only iPhone owner who’s also a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy–the book, not the film. Smartphones in general seem to be turning into the technology Douglas Adams envisioned all those years…

  • Annie Bacon’s Folk Opera

    Back in Santa Cruz, I marveled at Ukulele Dick and Oliver Brown, maestros of ukulele songsmithing and quirk. But sometimes a song is not just a song. Sometimes it’s an extended, operatic adventure, more like an urban folk ballad, played…

  • Seriously?

    Seems to me that the mockery from the general public for having stolen such a bad movie would be enough punishment. Jack Yates, 28, was sentenced to six months in prison today for making an unauthorized pre-release copy of “The…

  • THE EYEBALL, The Rumpus DVD Column: Synecdoche, New York

    These movies pass through our lives, take up two hours of our time, and go along their merry way. Recently I enjoyed Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, Orson Welles’s masterful Touch of Evil, and a collection of Pixar shorts. I…

  • Brian’s Saturday Morning Links

    Miss me? I expect I’ll be caught up from this move by sometime in mid-July, 2013. Bentham Science Publishers has a credibility problem. I think I saw that movie, almost 20 years ago. Sunspot simulation–the image is, if possible, even…

  • An Oral History of Myself #8: Mr. Miller

    In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with and transcribing the interviews, creating a kind of memoir but in other people’s words. What’s most interesting turns out not so much to be the things we remember differently as…

  • Monster Mashup

    To continue on the subject of monsters and mashes for a moment: Last Sunday in the Los Angeles Times, Ed Park published his notes on Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes, which is a novel narrated by none other than Frankenstein’s…

  • Monster Mash

    Two recent anthologies bring a literary touch to stories of the macabre.