Friday, March 27 2009
Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity
In a sense, panic is an imprecise word to describe the emotion of financial crashes; paranoia better suits.
Wednesday, March 25 2009
Last Lion by Peter S. Canellos
If you want a peek inside America's royal family, this is a must-read, with details that only Boston Globe reporters could know.
Friday, March 6 2009
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1964 by Susan Sontag
Sontag's journals suggest that the self is a conditional and transitory creation; elusive and slippery as an artful lover who wants to be a writer.
Thursday, February 26 2009
Blind Man with a Pistol: Ishmael Reed’s Misguided Pow-Wow
Anyone who has witnessed affirmative action policies in play can tell you that bad apples are chosen to fulfill a quota, not unlike a cop who harasses every citizen who bears a vague resemblance to a wanted suspect.
Friday, December 19 2008
Best Food Writing 2008, ed. Holly Hughes
Molecular gastronomy? Check. Locavores? Check. Post-Katrina restaurant recovery? Cloned meat? Paeans to the wonders of pig? Check, check, check.
Tuesday, December 16 2008
The Best of Sexology, ed. Craig Yoe
In1933 Gernsback published a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-scientific magazine devoted to sex and all its mysteries, vagaries, varieties -- not to mention all its anxieties.
Tuesday, December 2 2008
The Letters of Allen Ginsberg
Ginsberg was hyperaware of the frequent charge that Beat poetry was little more than improvised mumbo jumbo baked from jazz records and marijuana smoke.
Tuesday, September 23 2008
New Stories from the South 2008: The Year’s Best
Flannery O'Conner's hauntingly gothic South meets the modern American search for meaning in yet another superb edition of this series.
Monday, August 11 2008
Arcade Fire and H.G. Wells: The Lies Machine
Pop music may still travel in revolutions, but not along a fixed course maintaining an even degree of distance from its point of origin. Like a moon intolerant of its gravitation pull, each cycle drifts us further and further from the cycle before it.
Friday, February 22 2008
The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps by
The good stories are terrific reads and the not-so-good stories are never dull.
