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Photos: Stephen King-inspired artwork

Images from Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King
Artwork from Stephen King's novel covers and more

By: CENTIPEDE PRESS | January 14, 2010

Makes sense to him

John Ashbery's Planisphere
So understood is John Ashbery's post at the top of the contemporary American poetry heap (a distinction these days with the cultural heft of a Scrabble championship) that the question of just how to read him seems doomed to languish beside the point. Detractors need only a pillow and a trusty alarm clock to approach Ashbery.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | January 12, 2010

Interview: Don Lattin

Cracking Harvard's 'psychedelic club'
"This is like the founding myth of the '60s counterculture, even though there was a lot of truth to it."

By: CHRIS FARAONE | January 13, 2010

Remembering Joey Ramone

Long Live Rock Dept.
On top of everything else that was a drag about the decade just past, there was this: in a three-and-a-half-year span, we lost three quarters of the Ramones. And then CBGB closed.

By: MIKE MILIARD | January 08, 2010

Interview: Raj Patel

Borrow his book
"The opposite of consumption is not thrift but generosity; if you look at happiness studies, we are happiest when we give things away rather than when we accumulate or when we don't spend."

By: CHRIS FARAONE | December 30, 2009

Booked solid

A hefty season of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry
The holidays are over — time to hit the books.

By: BARBARA HOFFERT | January 04, 2010

2009: Rants of the Right

Going where few reviewers dare to tread.
Few "respectable" publications were willing to review the year's top-selling conservative books, but the Phoenix has no fear. After wading through 2500 or so pages of right-wing ravings, your brave correspondent reports back with the following analyses.

By: DAVID S. BERNSTEIN | December 22, 2009

Reading is fundamentalist

Conservative screeds dominated the book charts this year. Will future election results follow the bestseller lists?
In 2009, liberals held firm control of the presidency, the US Senate, and the US House of Representatives. But there was one realm where conservatives dominated: the New York Times bestseller list.

By: DAVID S. BERNSTEIN | December 22, 2009

2009: The year in books

True stories - fact and fiction
Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best books the Phoenix reviewed in 2009.

By: JON GARELICK | December 22, 2009

Book Review: The Tin Drum

Günter Grass and Tin Drum 2
There are — and have always been — two Günter Grasses. There's the Grass who was born in Danzig and the Grass who was born in Gdansk.

By: JEFFREY GANTZ | December 15, 2009

Fast and loose

Robert Altman's movie life
You're a cocky film-school grad with a drawer full of socko screenplays and Hollywood ambitions. But it's all California dreamin', as you're shivering in New England, cutting public-service announcements and digitizing educational videos, your only brush with the studios those Netflix rentals.

By: GERALD PEARY | December 09, 2009

Updike does death, R. Crumb does God, Vanity Fair does Proust

Gift books to savor
Trying to reach as broad a range of tastes and pocketbooks as possible, we this year scavenged everything from the front pages of the Onion to R. Crumb's genesis, to valedictory Updike. Stuff to read, stuff to look at, glossy pages and matte. Remember: be careful not to nick the pages or spill eggnog on them before you wrap. Happy holidays!

By: PHOENIX STAFF | December 08, 2009

GI blues

A former Army medic tells his story
"I think to an extent all soldiers come back with PTSD. If you do what we do and see what we see, if you're not affected in a deep way, then that's a problem."

By: CLEA SIMON | December 01, 2009

Pleasure principles

In happiness begins responsibility
Willard Spiegelman seems like a nice guy. He has had the good luck to live a happy life without major disaster or suffering. But as a long-time professor of English at Southern Methodist University and editor of the Southwest Review , he has ended up living his life among just those people — writers and academics.

By: CHARLES TAYLOR | December 02, 2009

Vegas and Jungleland

Paul Shaffer and the Big Man tell all
Paul Shaffer is a happenin’ cat. Pick an It Moment from pop culture over the past 30 years and Shaffer was there. He was an original band member on Saturday Night Live . He played hapless promo guy Artie Fufkin in This Is Spinal Tap . Disco? He co-wrote “It’s Raining Men.” And he helped David Letterman break ground as his glittery, ironic bandleader/sidekick.

By: JOYCE MILLMAN | November 24, 2009

Invisible playmates

Paul Auster makes promiscuity a virtue
To judge from the titles of some of his recent novels — The Book of Illusion s, Oracle Night , Man in the Dark , and now Invisible — Paul Auster's fiction is receding, Samuel Beckett style, into non-existence.

By: PETER KEOUGH | November 18, 2009

Magic tricks

Alice Munro has them, Philip Roth doesn’t
You have to give a seventysomething writer credit for daring to begin a book with “He’d lost his magic.”

By: ED SIEGEL | November 11, 2009

Mystic muso

The erudition of Robert Palmer
“America’s Pre-eminent Music Writer Dead at 52” was the headline on Robert Palmer’s obituary in Rolling Stone after his liver failed in 1997.

By: TED DROZDOWSKI | November 04, 2009

Brutal truths

Hilary Mantel’s Booker winner
To call a 560-page novel “spare” sounds ridiculous. But though Wolf Hall is both lengthy and dense, this book — essentially a character study of the 16th-century statesman Thomas Cromwell — is also as close to bare-bones writing as one can imagine, a stark and unsentimental triumph.

By: CLEA SIMON | November 02, 2009

Apocalypse wow

Margaret Atwood unleashes the End Times
At the start of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood , mankind is heaving its last gurgling sighs.

By: SHAULA CLARK | October 20, 2009

Sarah and the shipmates

Vowell on the Puritans and the founding of Rhode Island
Humorist, historian, superhero. Sarah Vowell is a woman of letters and voices.

By: MICHAEL ATCHISON | October 22, 2009

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