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Good grief

Deborah Noyes’s séance in Captivity
Grief bogs one down, sapping energy and confusing even the simplest thoughts with the static of regrets.

By: CLEA SIMON | June 09, 2010

High and low culture from Japan

Art of the Hole Dept.
Attention, admirers of quirky kitsch and over-the-top aesthetics: hit PAUSE on that Belle and Sebastian record for a second.

By: LANCE GOULD | June 02, 2010

Role model?

John Waters gets up close and personal
John Waters gets up close and personal

By: SHAULA CLARK | June 07, 2010

Stieg Larsson’s Girl is stinging Swedish noir
With its low crime rate and socialized everything, Sweden doesn’t seem very noirish compared with, say, LA. Then again, much of the country spends the entire winter without sunlight.

By: PETER KEOUGH | May 26, 2010

Cool killer

Ace Atkins runs down Machine Gun Kelly
Ace Atkins’s new novel is what the movie Public Enemies should have been.

By: CHARLES TAYLOR | May 18, 2010

Fully abled

Paul Guest’s life on wheels
When he was a fireworks-loving 12-year-old, Paul Guest rolled down a steep driveway on a bike with a broken brake cable. He steered onto the grass in an attempt to slow his momentum, the bike fell into a weed-concealed ditch, and Guest took flight. He landed with a third- and fourth-vertebrae-crushing, quadriplegia-inducing thud.

By: ALEX BLUM | May 18, 2010

Interview: Newsweek's Evan Thomas

Thomas discusses his new book, The War Lovers
"If you’re too slow and you lose the reader, it doesn’t matter what length the book is. You’ve got to engage the reader early and keep going. Campaigns are wonderfully suited to this because they’re thrilling quest stories."

By: PETER KADZIS | May 13, 2010

Slideshow: Photos from the War Lovers

Photos of Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Randolph Hearst, and more from Evan Thomas' book.
Photos from Evan Thomas' book The War Lovers.

By: EVAN THOMAS | May 14, 2010

Review: On the road with David Foster Wallace

David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself treads lightly in the footsteps of a literary giant
David Foster Wallace had a crush on Alanis Morissette. He drank Diet Rite soda by the case. David Lynch changed him.

By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN | May 17, 2010

Hearing voices

Dave Tompkins chases the Vocoder in his book How To Wreck a Nice Beach
Don’t be fooled by its textbook appearance — How To Wreck a Nice Beach (Melville House/Stop Smiling) is hardly a dry anthropological study of “The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop,” as the subtitle suggests.

By: CHRIS FARAONE | May 14, 2010

Lady of Leisure’s Prison Memoir

Crook Book Dept.
In prison, Piper Kerman had to get used to, among other trials, a bathroom infested with insects.

By: VALERIE VANDE PANNE | May 05, 2010

Echo chamber

Men are from Martin Amis, women are from . . . ?
As Under-Secretary of the Ted Hughes Rough Riders (Boston Chapter), I have been delighted by two recent developments.

By: JAMES PARKER | May 04, 2010

Interview: Paul Provenza

Comedy life saver
In Satiristas! veteran comic Paul Provenza engages in revealing, surprising conversation with a diverse group about comedy’s role in revealing uncomfortable truths about our world and ourselves.

By: ROB TURBOVSKY | May 04, 2010

Interview: Daniel Clowes

On going from Enid to Wilson
"If you had told me then that there would be cute girls coming to comic conventions in 15 years, I would’ve told you you were out of your mind."

By: MIKE MILIARD | April 27, 2010

Play ball!

Or, what’s in the Dominican water?
Red Sox fans are well versed in the creation myths of the team’s Dominican stars.

By: MIKE MILIARD | April 27, 2010

Life after Pi

Yann Martel’s next allegory
In contemporary literature, the Holocaust is the okapi in the room: looming and somehow irresistible.

By: CLEA SIMON | April 13, 2010

Hearts of glass

Ali Shaw’s modern fairy tale
In Ali Shaw’s debut novel, death by glass becomes a star-crossed love story in the vein of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale — a tragedy that strips away its isolated characters’ fears and defenses and reveals their bravery.

By: SHARON STEEL | April 06, 2010

Eat, pray, shove

Cooking with Mailer in two new memoirs
So after all the roarings and the thumpings and the garlands and the scandals, after all the sex and the jazz and the fires on the moon and the women’s-libbers howling for his blood and the glass bouncing off Gore Vidal’s head, the old lion ends his days in comfortable domesticity on the crooked fingertip of Cape Cod, nibbling teriyaki-infused oatmeal and reading baseball statistics on the crapper.

By: JAMES PARKER | March 30, 2010

Interview: Tamler Sommers

Philosophically speaking
One of the most enjoyable by-products of lit mag the Believer ’s many long, unconventional interviews has been the collection A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain , by 39-year-old University of Houston philosophy professor Tamler Sommers.

By: JON GARELICK | March 25, 2010

Otherworldly

Brad Watson’s aliens
The characters in Brad Watson’s new short-story collection tune in to unearthly energies and heed otherworldly guidance, but they are, finally, all too human — just looking for a little transcendence.

By: SUSAN CHAMANDY | March 23, 2010

Return to sender

Challah Back Dept.
Sure, we've all gotten an unwelcome fruitcake or fluorescent sweater in the mail, usually from a well-meaning and slightly out-of-touch relative. But few New England Jews could have been prepared for the surprise "gift" that recently arrived on their doorsteps courtesy of Georgia-based messianic former businessman Sid Roth.

By: KARA BASKIN | March 22, 2010

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