Recent Books Columns

No matter the vercity of the tale, The Haunting in Connecticut has just enough creep quotient to keep me engaged, especially since I grew up a few miles from the house.

Friday, October 23 2009

The Name of This Land is Hell: Mexico in Literature

When the author of a sitcom-styled novel about Mexican heritage cannot resist mentioning the modern-day carnage, then it's fair to assume that the murders have become a significant part of the national identity.

Friday, October 16 2009

Looking for the Lost: Memoirs of a Vanishing Japan

By Michael Antman

With its narrow streets and dark and hidden infoldings, there’s a distinctly feminine, mysterious, and inexplicably magnetic aspect to Japan that exists in few other places in the world.

(more Read Only Memory)

Tuesday, October 13 2009

Are Comics Like Reading with Training Wheels?

By Shaun Huston

Reading a comic requires multiple forms of literacy and levels of interpretation. Every movement from word to image and back again so as to create a coherent, narrative whole engages the reader’s brain in distinct ways.

(more Worlds in Panels)

Friday, September 25 2009

Hal Ashby: Hollywood Rebel

Films and books strive toward a common goal: telling a story. And very few modern filmmakers are as good at spinning a yarn as the late Hal Ashby was.

Thursday, September 24 2009

The Handmaid’s Tale: Not So Sci-fi

The terrifying, 'it could happen today' message of this story is best told in the Atwood's book, rather than the film version.

Tuesday, September 15 2009

Captain Obama and the Final Frontier

By George Reisch

Obama's four-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new kinds of political confusion; to boldly go where no rational health-care reformer has gone before.

(more Pop Goes Philosophy)

Friday, September 11 2009

She and I: A Fugue

By Michael Antman

Slapping the word 'Fiction' on the cover of a book is not a "get out of jail free" card or, more accurately, a license to kill – just because memoirs have to be true, it doesn’t follow that novels should be allowed to be false.

(more Read Only Memory)

Friday, September 4 2009

Ride This Time Machine Down a Road Less Traveled

By Mark Reynolds

Jump into that ’59 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz with the maxed-out tailfins, contemplate what an original Barbie doll could fetch on eBay, and enjoy this roll call of Reasons Why Everything Changed in 1959.

(more Negritude 2.0)

Wednesday, September 2 2009

Not to be Silenced: To Kill a Mockingbird

'To Kill a Mockingbird' is more than an enlightening tale of the racial inadequacies in the South during the Depression -- it inspired people to study law.

Monday, August 31 2009

The (Indie) Music Industry Is All Right

By Liz Colville

The media is too preoccupied with the funeral arrangements of the mainstream music industry to celebrate the life that is happening elsewhere.

(more Backslash)

Friday, August 28 2009

Rabid and Rascally Creatures: Richard Brookhiser’s “Happy Darkies”

Familial or political, conservatives in America actually have no moral boundaries whatsoever.

Wednesday, August 19 2009

Hockey Skatin’ Singing Cowgirls

By Juli Thanki

Country music ain’t the sole purview of the southern part of the northern hemisphere: Canada has its share of fireside soul(ful) singers, too.

(more Torch & Twang)

Monday, August 17 2009

Is Alyse Myers’ Life More Important Than Yours?

By Michael Antman

Ding dong! Ding dong! Another dysfunctional-family memoir bearing a terrible secret is at the door!

(more Read Only Memory)

Monday, August 10 2009

Your Brain is the New Factory Floor

By Rob Horning

"[M]ore and more, 'production' -- that word my fellow economists have worked over for generations -- has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor..."

(more Marginal Utility)

Thursday, August 6 2009

They Killed John Henry but They Won’t Kill Me

By Andrew Gilstrap

In these days of economic turmoil, massive job losses, and corporate profiteering, you'd expect to hear more rewritings of the John Henry legend.

(more Field Studies)

Thursday, July 30 2009

Rudy Wurlitzer, Bob Dylan, Bloody Sam, and the Jornado del Muerto

Dylan’s beautifully simple ballad captures the paradoxical fear of and longing for death that is the hallmark of Wurlitzer’s narratives and what lurks at the heart of the human experience.

Wednesday, July 29 2009

We All End Up in Diapers: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Comparing the book to the film, it’s as if Fitzgerald laid just the foundation, and from that Roth built a multi-storied house.