When people ask me for a book recommendation, wanting a good page-turner, I love to push Michael Malone's Uncivil Seasons. It's the opening segment in his Justin and Cuddy trilogy about two oddly matched detectives in North Carolina, and Malone produces a very rich reality
Podcast, schmodcast. I'm not sure what the hubbub is about--it's just a bunch of audio files. While you're waiting for the next installment of Johnny Dollar, Insurance Investigator, I'm already listening to all of Steve Martin's Pure Drivel. I
Friend of TMN Sam Brown has been making weird, witty, touching drawings for the last five years at Exploding Dog--each drawing inspired by a sentence submitted by a reader--and just in time for the holidays, he's released a book, Thinking of You, with more than 140
Harold Bloom is perhaps our finest Shakespeare critic and certainly one of literature's most passionate lovers. Who knew he's a big chili fan too?
Faulkner died 40-some years ago, and whether southern literature passed with him has been a hot topic ever since. Regardless of the genre's health, the region has lately produced a bevy of talented writers. One to watch is Michael Knight, the head of the creative writing program
The eponymously named tome that serves as the catalog for the Masters of American Comics exhibition at U.C.L.A.'s Hammer Museum and Los Angeles's MoCA contains work by familiar names such as R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware, as well as
Writer and musicologist Tom Piazza weighs in on his adopted city with the poignant Why New Orleans Matters. This book is a bittersweet paean to what is, arguably, the most joyous metropolis in North America and, ironically, the product of the kind of racial and cultural mongrelizing that America has
Students of Ian Frazier, fetch your Visas! How many young writers, humor lovers, Tina Brown haters have heard of Veronica Geng? If only for her piece "Love Trouble Is My Business"--a detective story made of sentences containing the phrases "Mr. Reagan" and "read Proust&
In 1990, Twin Peaks followers wanted to know who killed Laura Palmer. The producers of the show, on the other hand, may have wanted to know how to make a killing on Twin Peaks. Enter Diane.... Read by Kyle MacLachlan, this audiobook is a fascinating chronology of Agent Cooper'
I imagine Magdalen Powers living by herself in a tiny cottage in the middle of a deep forest. Birds and wolves prepare breakfast while she sleeps. During the day she goes skinny-dipping with Kelly Link. In the evening, James Tate stops by for tea and complaining about the human
