I recently enjoyed two new novels, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta, that left me thinking about the shimmering surfaces of everyday life, and the interwoven meshes of secrecy and guilt that ripple beneath. One novel is about a clever and bookish Vietnamese … Read the rest
I was psyched when I heard that a novel about New York City in the punk rock 1970s by Garth Risk Hallberg was expected to be one of the blockbusters of 2015, and that the unproven young author had been awarded an astonishing two million dollar advance for this book. … Read the rest
Don Carpenter was a writer’s writer. Born in Berkeley, California in 1931, he grew up there and in Portland, Oregon, served in the Air Force during the Korean War, and returned to earn a B.S. from Portland State and an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State. In 1966 … Read the rest
“It was a lust for political power.” – Bob Woodward
“There is no simple answer.” – John Dean
President Richard Nixon, caught in a big lie, resigned in disgrace forty years ago. As we commemorate our shared memories of this astounding political scandal today, we are unwittingly basking in a … Read the rest
Maggie Estep, the charismatic and accessible spoken word poet and author, has suddenly died of a heart attack. She was 50 years old.
Maggie Estep was a big part of the slam poetry scene that emerged from Chicago and New York City in the 1980s and briefly flared into pop … Read the rest
Back when I was an art class nerd in high school, I once struggled with an assignment to use “negative space”. We were supposed to create a painting or artwork that communicated through the shape or presence of what wasn’t there, rather than what was.
I didn’t understand the assignment … Read the rest
I’ll never forget where I was and how I felt when I read the closing pages of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, the first and most crucial part of his New York Trilogy
City of Glass was … Read the rest
The shaded cobblestone streets of Garden Rest are lined with shops, cottages, a pub, a boarding house near the town square, and of course, something nefarious lurking in dark hinterlands. John Shirley’s Doyle After Death
First, it … Read the rest
The odds didn’t look good for the new film version of The Great Gatsby this weekend, I thought, as I donned my plastic 3-D glasses and entered the dark theater. I wasn’t expecting to like the movie much at all.
I don’t love glitzy Hollywood spectacle, though I was willing … Read the rest
