Books

Honeymoon and Other Stories Kevin Canty (Doubleday) I read this whole book on the train to Seattle, sitting at a little, four-person train table with a grandma and two kids under 10. It was obvious when she talked to them that the grandma really did love the kids, but every 10 minutes or so she […]

The Cold Six Thousand James Ellroy (Knopf) Thursday, June 12th Twenty-Third Avenue Books 1015 NW 23rd, 224-5097 James Ellroy is the premier literary stylist working in the mystery genre today. He’s the James Joyce of literary mysteries, concocting a unique style to accommodate his dire world view. He writes prose of such immediacy, freshness, hardness, […]

Hey, you anarchists and agitators, environmentalists, capitalist, cops, Buddhists, and urban planners–get out your pencils, your bookmarks. I’m giving you, specifically, a reading assignment: Ill Nature, by Joy Williams. And all of you who love long walks on the beach, who step over plastics, beer cans, and dead seagulls, who utilize curbside recycling as a […]

Tony Earley Powell’s City of Books Thurs May 3, 7:30 pm I imagine callingmy childhood phone number to see if anyone answers. The phone number is among my earliest memories, tied to an address of a house long since razed, acres of land turned into parking lots and businesses. Every apple tree, willow, and morning […]

Beat Punks Victor Bockris (Da Capo Press) Names like Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, and William Burroughs are splashed across the cover of Victor Bockris’s collection of profiles–this could easily come off as a marketing scam, and sometimes it absolutely is. But when Bockris takes the time to delve deeper into each subject (his […]

Black Wax: The Notorious Confession of Alexander Wokowski Benjamin Watson (Xlibris) America is knee-deep in wannabe novelists. I know, because I’m one of them, and so are most of my friends. So I understand all too well Benjamin Watson’s frustrations with the world of traditional publishers, a world which refused to publish his first two […]

This weekend, Sarah Vowell will stand up in the seedy Roseland Theatre–a venue soaked in cigarette smoke and used almost exclusively for rock and rap shows–and, of all things, read. The fact that she’s not doing it as a guest speaker at a private college, and that Fasttixx can charge $15, is a good example […]