Features & Reviews
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Through a Glass Darkly
“I don’t know where we got the idea that helping sick people means keeping them away from the jaws of death at all costs…”
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Why Do Scandinavians Seek The Darkness?
One of the biggest selling, most highly-praised novels at my bookstore right now is The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Since it just came out in paperback, we’ve been selling like six of them a week. Based…
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Billy Twitters and His Big Blue Whale Problem
Mac Barnett, former director of 826LA, has released a children’s book: Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem. JR at Three Guys One Book has this to say:
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Josh Nathan: The Last Book I Loved, Slapstick
I began reading Kurt Vonnegut after I had slid too far down to climb back up the slide of becoming a full-blown pessimist. I remember feeling this during a month long trip to Mexico. I saw villages with homes made…
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Robot Horses Waging War on Angels: A Profile of Chris Eaton
There are bodies, and there are words. The bodies shift sides and see their components replaced; they look in mirrors and see themselves made horrific, the mechanical overtaking the organic, and they ask themselves whether they can still feel, still…
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Freedom Fighters
A new novel by Kate Walbert chronicles five generations of women’s struggles, from suffrage to the War on Terror.
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The Last Book I Loved: C. Max Magee, Paper Trails
A collection of newspaper columns might sound like pretty dull fare, especially 30-year-old columns. But Pete Dexter’s punchy, combustible, wry, and sometimes goofy pieces are irresistible. Paper Trails, released in hardcover in 2007 (but never released in paperback and now…
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The Rumpus Original Combo with Danzy Senna
We are all students of memory. Each of us has our own truth to tell.
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Joseph Cervelin: The Last Book I Loved, The Informers
Brett Easton Ellis offers social observations, morbid humor, and compounding degrees of separation and decadence. If his story cycle The Informers were a Choose Your Own Adventure book, here are some outcomes: – You take your disenfranchised son to Hawaii,…
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Tess Bryant: The Last Book I Loved, The Sea, The Sea
Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea has, despite my initial wariness about reading the journal of a lonely bitter man, worked its way into being the last book I loved. This story of the arrogant and sexist Charles Arrowby…
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Stephen Burt On Enjoying New Poetry
Over the weekend, I finally got around to unboxing and shelving my archived litmags in the new apartment. As I placed my issues of the Believer back into magazine files in proper order, the top headline on the cover of the…
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An Excerpt From Zeitoun
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business.