When I was little I would squint my eyes in a dark room and see stippled, fluorescent color. I wondered if everyone saw the same thing. Now, thanks to the DNA…
“The diary of a copywriter, written on company time, billed to the client.” The House of Wigs is a small collection of sixty admirable short stories from the folks at…
A neat find on eBay: someone’s in the last day of an auction on a Harry Stephen Keeler book with a letter from ol’ Harry himself tucked in. Keeler notes…
This semester, I decided to teach The Road by Cormac McCarthy. After I got my desk copy, I was sitting on BART, on my way home, and I started rereading…
“One time I was reading Haruki Murakami and I thought: if I had the chance, would I ever ask him why his characters always vanish? I’m not sure I’d want…
How does a baby view its mother? This question bothers Ken Jacobs, a legend of independent film, whose work is currently on view at tank.tv (a free online film gallery…
My home town’s minor league hockey team went through several transformations when I was growing up. First they were called the Dusters, a name that evoked dirt roads, not slick…
Dubai is quite possibly the craziest place someone could be right now. A city halted in the middle of Final Fantasy style urbanization by economic collapse. A constitutional monarchy with…
Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle is a crass and hilarious slice of growing up “different,” as fun to read today as it was in 1973. Molly Bolt is an unashamed…
Andrew Motion is retiring as Britain’s Poet Laureate, and he has a few words on the matter. Exoskeleton on the tension between “greatness” and the avant-garde in poetry. What do…