Click image to enlarge: … All Over Coffee is published in the Sunday Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle, on SFGate.com, and in two book collections by City Lights…
The book’s strongest moments are often its quietest, as when the complexity of the speaker’s engagement with himself and the world is repulsed or rerouted by automatic prompts and alienation.
I call James McMurtry late one morning when I’m visiting Austin, Texas. By now, I’ve seen him play three times, in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and California, and I’m always struck by…
Shannon Cain’s short story collection, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, offers a refreshingly agnostic and all-embracing perspective on sexual desire and identity.
That Václav Havel’s death was overshadowed by Kim Jong Il, that loopy coward, is a joke that might have made Havel, the writer, laugh. Idiot tyranny finally pays him back…
In Sancta, divinity irradiates. The afterlife approaches nuclear, dangerous and fascinating, a mysterium tremendum fascinans that can kill you with overexposure.
Beneath Shame’s veneer of soulless chic and artful grit, there’s an urgency that’s like an infant’s cry: blunt yet piercing, aware only of its own pain.
Strange, surreal and occasionally macabre, the new short-fiction anthology The Speed Chronicles offers a primer on a class of illicit substances—and a category of human experience—at once painful and joyous.