Diane Leach has a Master’s Degree in English Literature from Humboldt State University. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, January Magazine, and The Collagist. Her novel, A Discerning Eye, is available at Lulu.com. She can be reached at dianesleach@gmail.com.
Features
Monday, November 9 2009
Ayn Rand and the World She Made
Ayn Rand set out to remake reality as if it were an ill-fitting dress: by sheer will, she tried to fashion a Balenciaga gown from a housedress.
Wednesday, July 8 2009
Moonwalking
My God, could that man dance. Michael Jackson moved like the love child of Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse.
Friday, January 30 2009
What It Was Like
In the early '80s Detroit, Motown was as unquestionable as air. Who didn't like air?
Thursday, October 23 2008
Pink Floyd and the Girl on the Floor
If Roger Waters existed, if Pink Floyd existed, there was a tiny margin of hope, a filament of promise thinner than jeweler’s wire.
Wednesday, June 18 2008
Bibliotherapy
Secondhand bookstores are about more than literary treasures. As Diane Leach explains, they contain personal histories that connect readers through the ages.
Columns
Monday, January 23 2012
Riding Into a Nightmare: 'A Train in Winter'
Caroline Moorehead's A Train In Winter, like Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, leaves nothing to the imagination, a decision that makes reading it simultaneously engrossing and deeply disturbing.
Wednesday, February 2 2011
Ammon Shea Is Not In the Phone Book, But He Read It, Cover to Cover
I’ve finally met somebody who possibly loves books more than I do, and certainly knows more about them.
Tuesday, March 2 2010
Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life
We so want our geniuses to be perfect people. Or at least nice people -- and so often they aren’t.
Reviews
Monday, January 30 2012
On a Wing and a Prayer: 'We Need To Talk About Kevin'
Eva is by nature a dark realist. She tries to understand what drives her inscrutable child, and can only think he resents the very fact of being alive.
Tuesday, January 24 2012
In William Gibson's 'Distrust That Particular Flavor', the Title Says It All
For a writer whose primary topic is the immediate present or near future, many of the essays in Distrust That Particular Flavor are as dated as the Commodore 64.
Wednesday, January 18 2012
'Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage': A Well-Known Topic Well Worth a Revisit
Hazel Rowley’s investigation into this most unusual presidential couple will have you glued to your chair, oblivious to the dying Christmas tree or niggling New Year’s Resolutions involving the gym.
Thursday, December 8 2011
In 'Occupants', Henry Rollins Intends to Rub You the Wrong Way -- and He Succeeds
“If some of the sentiments expressed rub you the wrong way, there’s a good chance they rub me the wrong way as well. A lot of the things I see in the world rub me the wrong way. Some of them are in this book.”
Wednesday, November 30 2011
Things Fall Apart: Joan Didion's 'Blue Nights'
Joan Didion is unmoored by loss. Out of that loss comes this second, searing memoir, Blue Nights.
Blogs
Tuesday, January 11 2011
Gerry Rafferty: An Appreciation
Gerry Rafferty died too young, embittered and ravaged by alcoholism, added to the strange but poignant list of people we’ve never met but still miss. He leaves behind a perfect song, an aching, sad, beautiful story attached to a sax solo forever lodged in the right brains of millions of music fans.
