Nicole Williams
In the author’s note that opens Nonrequired Reading, Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska writes about a reader’s freedom: to read intelligent books or stupid ones, to stop long before the end of a book, to eavesdrop, to ...
Phil Freeman
Out-of-print records, suddenly reissued, can serve as a kind of secret history. The paradigmatic example is the Nuggets garage-rock compilation, originally released in the 1970s and recently expanded into a four-CD boxed set, with an equally large follow-up set ...
Eva Hunter
In his ninth novel, Forever, Pete Hamill tackles a number of classic themes: the longing for eternal life, the sins of the fathers passed to the sons, humankind’s unremitting quest for freedom, and the existential question of what makes ...
Phil Freeman
Jazz is all about making personal statements. The introspection which earns surprised plaudits in pop is routine in jazz. A jazz performer is expected to turn each album, each tune, into a journey through his own heart and mind, ...
Emma French
100% Cotton dyed Noren. Handmade in Japan. a limited production noren for the serious noren enthusiast This study forms an ambitious attempt to combine a variety of complex analytical frameworks with a new rhetorical critical model for ...
Nigam Nuggehalli
It’s gratifying to find an author who investigates a subject from first principles. Such studies are not only illuminating, they are easier to digest for people unfamiliar with the subject. Haberski’s book, a study of film as a cultural ...
Eva Hunter
Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir Andrew Dickos spins a good web for film noir addicts in Street with No Name. Although the book ...
Eva Hunter
It’s not uncommon for chapbooks to grow out of literary festivals at all, so Sonny Brewer has done nothing new in publishing “stories” written, at least in part, by the eclectic group of writers who appeared at a somewhat ...
Phil Freeman
The story of the West Memphis 3 is the kind of perversion of justice that fuels East and West Coast natives’ nightmares about finding themselves trapped in “flyover country.” Three teenagers, one of them mentally handicapped, sentenced to life ...
Les Wright
The protagonist of The Contortionist's Handbook, John Dolan Vincent, Jr., began life as an abnormally gifted child, in a chaotic and violent blue-collar household. His puny size and his remarkable, fully-formed sixth digit on one hand have contributed to ...
