Rodger Jacobs has won multiple awards and grants for his work as a journalist, documentary writer and producer, screenwriter, playwright, magazine editor, true crime writer, book critic, columnist, and live event producer. He provided the preface and original inspiration for Jack London: San Francisco Stories (Sydney Samizdat Press) in 2010.
Features
Thursday, May 13 2010
Afterword: Rhymes of a Rolling Stone
Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks is a superb work of theater, a classic, albeit cryptic, tale of triumph over adversity.
Friday, October 31 2008
Tender Is the Night of the Living Dead
Another slice of social commentary disguised as zombie flash fiction inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald and George Romero.
Tuesday, July 29 2008
Bleeding on the Page in the Middle of a Nervous Breakdown: Willy Vlautin’s Northline
Willy Vlautin loves the damaged people that most of us would go out of our way to avoid.
Columns
Friday, January 27 2012
'Library After Air Raid': On the Survival of Culture Amid the Barbarity of War
War is a science, science is an art and art, as Library After Air Raid attests, is everything.
Thursday, March 24 2011
‘Reading Jackie’: When Literary Choices Become Biography
Despite her love of books, Jackie Kennedy Onassis spent a lifetime trying to prevent people from writing about her, sometimes with the accompanying threat of legal action. Her entire life was led with one arm thrust outward, eyes cast downward, keeping the world at bay.
Friday, February 4 2011
Lynd Ward and Walt Disney: Illustrators of America's Tumultuous History
Much as Walt Disney would do with his famed television programs of the '50s and '60s, Lynd Ward used his talents with watercolor, oil, brush and ink, mezzotint, and lithography to illustrate hundreds of inspiring historical biographies of true-life American heroes for children to admire and emulate.
Friday, June 11 2010
The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney: A 'Suspicious' Literary Biography
Marion Meade's new book begs the question: Are literary biographies necessary? Somewhere in the afterlife, Nathanael West is having a good chuckle.
Friday, February 5 2010
Orson Welles: A Man of a Certain Ego
“The chief proof of a man’s real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness. It argues... a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself proof of nobility.”
Reviews
Thursday, September 3 2009
Soul of a People: Writing America's Story
Federal funding for the arts in the U.S. was a contentious issue for FDR's Works Progress Administration.
Monday, August 11 2008
Ten Bad Dates with De Niro, by Richard T. Kelly
A serious (and quite often satiric) cinematic shopping list for moviegoers.
Thursday, June 5 2008
Looking for Jimmy by Peter Quinn
The disastrous Irish Potato Famine: the result of the collision of unchecked technological advances and subjugation to a conquering monarchy.
Friday, May 23 2008
Dictation by Cynthia Ozick
With equal measures of wit, sorrow, and pity, four short novellas are artfully sewn together to explore the unceasing human effort to be known by posterity, no matter how petty or inhumane the actions for which we are remembered.
Tuesday, April 22 2008
The Moments Lost by Bruce Olds
At times impressive in scope and range, the narrative ultimately suffers and strangulates under the weight of the author’s use and abuse of alliterations and arcane verbs and nouns.
Blogs
Thursday, March 8 2012
Klegg the Drunk: John Updike on Raymond Carver
John Updike the East Coast moral aesthete and Raymond Carver the West Coast drunken Everyman had more in common than met the eye.
Tuesday, February 1 2011
Something Rare: Ernest Hemingway's Mystic Communion
The lure of mystery and dread in Catholicism that attracted the fatalistic author.
Tuesday, January 11 2011
Life During Wartime: Carl Sandburg's Poetry of the Macabre
For every moment of brief tedium in Sandburg’s masterpiece, the master suddenly hits the reader with a scene or a moment that is breathtaking in its prose and cold, dispassionate observation of life during wartime.
Thursday, July 15 2010
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
The Library of America Outdoes Itself with New Release of a Classic Updike Baseball Essay
Monday, May 10 2010
Chuck Palahniuk: Just Shut Up
Postmodern novelist and essayist Chuck Palahniuk is the literary equivalent of a shock jock.
