Novel Regime
Tom Rob Smith’s latest explores Krushchev’s 1956 speech to the party faithful.
Robert Birnbaum
What a Year It Was!
Former Boston Globe and Pulitzer Prize-winning scribe Fred Kaplan (who also writes for Slate) can be forgiven for the hyperbolic claim of the subtitle in 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Wiley), as there are at least two other books that pretty much claim the same thing--and, after all,
Persistently Unusual Subjects
With The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays From Tin House edited by Lee Montgomery, literary magazine Tin House culls (with a few original exceptions) its Summer Writers Workshop and offers up 17 essays by the likes of Dorothy Allison, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, Rick Bass, Margot Livesey, Antonya Nelson,
From the Backs of the Racks
The mantle of unacknowledgement falls on many shoulders beyond the poetic brotherhood (and sisterhood): librarians, primary school teachers, booksellers, and so forth. The many small (this description apparently refers to circulation size) magazines and their preternaturally dedicated staffs existing across the U.S. and the known world are overqualified for
It'll Last Longer
Photography has changed dramatically in the past 20 years--beyond the mutations caused by digital technology. In the '80s, advertising led by fashion and lifestyle products began to look for a more editorial feel and impact, and so portraiture broke out of a formalist straightjacket. This was also true
Graphic
It was not too long ago (that's in historical time, not 24/7 time) that comics, along with blue jeans and rock and roll, were somehow considered--by anxious parents and the usual whack jobs--to be contributors to juvenile delinquency. It was just one of the great
Brain and Bones
Jim Harrison is an author, a novelist, an anthologist, a screenwriter—but mostly, he’s a poet.
The Duh Vinci Code
As usual, it is the best of times and the worst of times, which is as good a time as any to spin a tale of two novels. Ron Carlson, a masterful writer of a number of story collections and books, has published The Signal (Viking), a compact, 200-page
Taking Woodstock
Forty years and three days ago, hippies invaded Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, N.Y.
The Simple Art
Californian Richard Lange (Dead Boys) has written a taut, sure-footed walk on L.A.'s wild side with This Wicked World (Little, Brown)--certainly not of the city of angels and movie stars, but the metropolis of hopeful and exploited immigrants, low-life hustlers, psychos, and all stripes