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
Thursday, May 24 2012
How She Left the Russian Forest: 'Enchantments'
If you had no idea that Russian mystic / charlatan / healer / pretender Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, aka the Mad Monk, had a wife and two daughters, you are not alone.
Thursday, May 3 2012
The Ghost in the Machine: Ellen Ullman's 'The Bug'
Ellen Ullman has the rare experience of having worked in computing while holding fast to what might be called old-fashioned values: a deep appreciation for the arts, the need for human contact, and the ability to write about it all in a gripping novel.
Monday, April 23 2012
Welcome to the Machine: 'Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents'
These days you no longer need a guitar to punish your mom. Armed with a laptop, you can hack into a bank, a credit card transaction, an identity, a government, all from the privacy of a bedroom you rarely, if ever, leave.
Tuesday, April 10 2012
The Search for Self: Ellen Ullman's 'By Blood'
Ellen Ullman is known by too few as author of the cult novel The Bug and Close to the Machine, her memoir of being one of the earliest female computer programmers in a then-nascent industry. Her third work, By Blood, leaves computers in favor of the soul.
Monday, March 26 2012
The (Rare) Possibility for Redemption: Zoe Heller's 'Everything You Know'
Zoë Heller loves a nasty narrator. Consider the infamous Barbara of What was She Thinking? or Audrey of The Believers, whose remarks were expertly deployed verbal cleavers. Here, we are given Willy Muller, a British writer of dubious credentials.
Blogs
Friday, May 25 2012
An Honorable Food: Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's 'Seductions of Rice'
Even the most timid cook, possessed of the most rudimentary kitchen, will benefit from Seductions of Rice. Read it and allow yourself to be enthralled. Then get cooking.
Monday, May 7 2012
Feed Thyself, Or, More than Just a Tomato Plant for Today's Urban Dweller
You might not have enough good southernly light coming through a kitchen window to nourish a twig of basil. You might not even have a kitchen window. But you might have an empty lot in your neighborhood, and that's where authors Willow Rosenthal and Novella Carpenter can help city dwellers like you grow their own food.
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.
