Ben Bush

Last year actor and monologist Spalding Gray committed suicide, jumping

With Wickett’s Remedy, Myla Goldberg has followed up her acclaimed debut, Bee Season (soon to be a major movie starring Richard Gere), with a story about the massive and nearly forgotten 1918 Spanish Influenza Epidemic in Boston. Set against the

Rather than a deserved reputation as an innovative stylist, Cooper is best known for the deviant subject matter of his previous novels—fisting, erotic snuff films and violently victimized teens—and critics have long pleaded with him to turn his prodigious talents to other topics. In answer, he offers God Jr., perhaps the first truly great

Aimee Bender’s stories fall distinctly into one of two styles, each of which is on display in her new collection, Willful Creatures. She is best known for

Love and War in Afghanistan by Alex Klaits and Gulchin Gulmamadova-Klaits (Seven Stories) “Even though I was Taliban, I think few people here in our village hold any grudges against me… Everyone understands that in order to have survived here over the last 25 years, it’s been necessary at times to do things that we […]

Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture edited by Thurston Moore (Universe) Thurston Moore’s collaborative zine-like book Mix Tape is like a mix tape of mix tapes: John Zorn, DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay, Mike Watt, Dodie Bellamy, Mac McCaughan, and dozens more writers, graphic designers, artists, and other people in the entertainment industry share stories […]

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer’s follow-up to his best-selling Everything is Illuminated, is immediately notable for incorporating an array of unliterary items into the text: photos of turtles copulating and characters’ hairlines, sections written in telephone keypad code, and a flip […]

Kafka on the Shoreby Haruki Murakami (Knopf) Kafka is a Tokyo teenager, who runs away from his home after his father tells him he is destined to murder his father and sleep with his mother and sister. (And you thought the sex talk with your parents was uncomfortable.) Kafka flees to a historic rural library, […]