Columns

Waiting to inhale: Jeff VanderMeer on his book Finch

By Cynthia Hawkins

Published: 11/4/2009

Types: The Arts, Literature

Head in his hands, whiskey at the ready, John Finch has a problem. He’s a local employed by an occupying force, tasked with solving a double homicide — one of his, one of theirs. His own regard him as a traitor. The others, expendable. The more he discovers, the closer he gets to the end of the line...[MORE]

La maravillosa vida literaria de Junot Diaz

By Gregg Barrios

Published: 10/28/2009

Types: The Arts, Literature

Imagine a first novel with a nerdy gordito Dominican-born protagonist who lives in New Jersey and is steeped in the geek speak of genre fiction and untranslated Spanish. A fan boy who dreams of becoming a latterday J.R.R. Tolkien and may wind up a 30-year-old virgin (un pecado mortal si eres dominic...[MORE]

Script doctor

By Gregg Barrios

Published: 10/21/2009

Types: The Arts

Ethan Canin burst onto the literary scene in 1988 with Emperor of the Air, a short-fiction collection that he wrote while attending Harvard Medical School. The late Walker Percy hailed the work as “dazzling, at times breathtaking, at other times heartbreaking.”  For a while, Canin divided ...[MORE]

The scourge of the Lege: Remembering Ms. Molly

By Steven G. Kellman

Published: 10/21/2009

Types: Cover Story, Second Story

Though she dubbed him Shrub and persistently ridiculed him as “just another upper-class white boy trying to prove he’s tough,” Molly Ivins and George W. Bush grew up in the same ’hood. River Oaks was Houston’s toniest address, and their families mingled with other members of the petroleum plutocracy...[MORE]

Body stockings: Coffee-table book fails the man who welded femme to fatale

By Rick Klaw

Published: 7/29/2009

Types: The Arts, Literature, Books

During the sleazy paperback era of the 1950s, femme fatales dominated book covers. Creator of more than 600 covers, Robert A. Maguire mastered the form and crafted images throughout the decade and into the 1980s. Pop-culture historian Jim Silke surveys this prolific painter’s career in the retrospec...[MORE]

Human architecture: Mazzucchelli deconstructs a marriage in Asterios Polyp

By Jess Harvell

Published: 7/29/2009

Types: The Arts, Literature, Books

The “literary” graphic novel has been both a boon and a bane to comics as an art form, given that so much of what’s been produced under the banner rarely works as comics. A comic’s narrative pleasures, when the form is really cooking, are based on visual invention as much as traditional literary mer...[MORE]

Crazy sort of folk: Lansdale takes a 'Vanilla Ride'

By Rick Klaw

Published: 7/1/2009

Types: The Arts, Literature, Books

“[The Hap and Leonard stories] are crazy sort of folk tales mixed with reality, but it’s always the social and cultural issues and the two characters that drive the series.” — Joe R. Lansdale Joe R. Lansdale, previously best known as a pivotal figure in the blood and guts infused ’80s splatte...[MORE]

Unjust desserts: Department of the harder we tried, the harder we fell

By Rick Klaw

Published: 5/13/2009

Types: The Arts

Humbug will be a crusading magazine. We will tackle important important national issues such as Should the Mayflower Replica be Allowed to Land in the U.S., and Fluoridation — the Red Conspiracy. Humbug will be a responsible magazine. We won’t write for morons. We won’t do anything just to ge...[MORE]

¿Que quiere decir ‘Brownsville’?: Identity lost and found in the borderlands

By Sarah Fisch

Published: 4/8/2009

Types: The Arts

Remember “books”? Those flippy rectangular things you used to spend a lot of time reading, back before the internet? Often associated with “school.” I largely lived through them, once, but now I read far fewer than I used to, particularly in the genre of the contemporary novel. Apparently the same...[MORE]

‘MAD’ men

By John DeFore

Published: 3/18/2009

Types: The Arts

Please forgive the headline’s allusion to the year’s hippest TV show, but our subjects this month demand it, springing as they do from the pages of America’s seminal satirical series, MAD Magazine. Both books (published by Fantagraphics) capture sides of artists that went unexposed under the auspice...[MORE]

Sweeping the clouds away: Exhaustive book tells us how a group of TV innovators got to ‘Sesame Street’

By Molly O’Donnell

Published: 3/4/2009

Types: The Arts

The children’s education series Sesame Street remains a singular program in television history. On the air since November 1969, it maintains the prestige of being the first, and possibly only, show for pre-schoolers that is as educational as it is entertaining. Former Baltimore resident and Jewis...[MORE]

Appalachia y Aztlán: So close to the Alamo, so far from God

By B.V. Olguín

Published: 3/4/2009

Types: The Arts

In “Hedge Ghosts,” the opening poem of her first full collection, Elijah’s Farm (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), Tennessee transplant Rachel Jennings shares a familiar familial yearning: “Like anyone I wanted / elders and epic heroes / and not such ghosts as these ... ” These family ghosts, she rev...[MORE]

Punk Monk: Zero Defex bassist Brad Warner says Zen can stop you from being a dick

By D.X. Ferris

Published: 2/25/2009

Types: The Arts

Brad Warner has practiced Zen for more than 20 years. He’s become an internationally noted teacher of the spiritual discipline, but it hasn’t eliminated his problems. Staring down a divorce and pondering an affair, the punk-bassist-turned-Zen-teacher had the idea for his new book, Zen Wrapped in ...[MORE]

Rewards patience

By John DeFore

Published: 2/11/2009

Types: Cover Story, Section Cover

A handful of books about the work and life of superhero legend Jack Kirby have been released in recent years, but few hold as much interest to me as a new tome about an artist working in his shadow. The long overdue Daniel Johnston (Rizzoli) will be an eye-opener to anyone who only knows the Texan’s...[MORE]

Tripping through the ‘Twilight Zone’: Nostalgia (or is it?)

By Rick Klaw

Published: 2/4/2009

Types: The Arts

On October 2, 1959, Rod Serling introduced his seminal anthology TV series The Twilight Zone to an unsuspecting viewing public. Unlike the plethora of similar shows conceived in that era (Tales of Tomorrow, One Step Beyond, and several others), Serling’s blend of quality production and social awaren...[MORE]

Gore vital

By Rick Klaw

Published: 1/28/2009

Types: The Arts

Eating and reading often go well together. An entertaining book and a good meal make for a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Unless the book happens to be Charlie Huston's gruesome thriller The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. When his roommate tires of his freeloading, Webster “Web” Fil...[MORE]

Dream time

By John DeFore

Published: 1/14/2009

Types: The Arts

For a cartoonist whose first big exposure to U.S. audiences was as well received as Epileptic, it’s a bit of a surprise to see the second English-language graphic novel by Frenchman David B. (born David Beauchard), Nocturnal Conspiracies, coming from the publisher NBM (nbmpub.com). The company has n...[MORE]

Axl of evil

By Greg M. Schwartz

Published: 1/7/2009

Types: The Arts

With Axl Rose finally delivering his long awaited Chinese Democracy album to the public in November, interest in Guns N’ Roses is at its highest level in more than a decade. Author Stephen Davis, who gave us the definitive Led Zeppelin biography in Hammer of the Gods, now opportunistically deliv...[MORE]

Grail-hunters

By Rick Klaw

Published: 1/7/2009

Types: The Arts

Chris Roberson wisely dedicated his 14th novel to Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, and Kim Newman, three authors who pioneered the difficult to execute non-linear, historical, time-travel adventure. Following in their perennially successful footsteps, Roberson’s End of the Century recounts three u...[MORE]

Clintonian: Impulsive, philandering, and voracious, yes, but it takes a little hypomania to be great

By Violet Glaze

Published: 12/3/2008

Types: The Arts

What’s wrong with Bill Clinton? How could a successful, popular, shrewd, and intelligent president allow himself to be dragged into a sex scandal so notorious it would forever overshadow all the good his administration had accomplished in his double-term tenure? That’s the question that nags at m...[MORE]

A saint without God: Camus’ Notebooks

By Steven G. Kellman

Published: 11/26/2008

Types: The Arts

Albert Camus was 46 on January 4, 1960, when the flashy open convertible that his publisher, Michel Gallimard, was driving smashed into a tree, killing them both. Camus’ afterlife is now longer than his brief but luminous existence. It has included the posthumous publication of two unfinished novels...[MORE]

The man behind the mask

By Rick Klaw

Published: 11/19/2008

Types: The Arts

Visionary writers like Bradley Denton often remain below the radar of public consciousness. Denton’s masterful 1993 novel Blackburn introduced the concept of the moralistic serial killer, a full decade before Jeff Lindsay parlayed a similar idea into four popular novels and the highly ...[MORE]

The time machine: A camera, a community, and 22 years

By Lyle Rosdahl

Published: 11/12/2008

Types: Cover Story, Section Cover

The Oxford Project, a collaboration between photographer Peter Feldstein and writer Stephen G. Bloom (as well as the town of Oxford, Iowa, without whom this project would not have existed), has a commanding presence. It’s not just the size of the book, but the scope of the undertaking: an entire tow...[MORE]

Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide

By Jeremy Martin

Published: 11/5/2008

Types: Screens & Tech

Pitching your book as the “ultimate guide” to anything is a risky move, especially when there are nerds involved, and there’s not much nerdier than a good zombie film. For that reason, I’m guessing movie reviewer Glenn Kay’s claim to an authoritative zombie-film text has already earned him more h...[MORE]

Open wounds

By Rick Klaw

Published: 11/5/2008

Types: The Arts

Celebrity philanthropic efforts often center around a few photo opportunities showcased to further a career. These usually well-meaning events generally turn a fleeting spotlight on the truly needy, such as the numerous Africa plights, conquered Tibet, or the disaster relief du jour. With I Liv...[MORE]

Temporary fill

By Lyle Rosdahl

Published: 10/29/2008

Types: The Arts

I happened to meet Andrew Porter at a party not too long ago. At the time, I didn’t realize that a story from his collection The Theory of Light & Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, is included in the Pushcart Prize 2008 anthology, which was sitting on my desk at ho...[MORE]

Spiegelman, before and after the Holocaust: Framed (graphic novels and comix)

By John DeFore

Published: 10/22/2008

Types: The Arts

Creating an apex of expression in a given art form has to take a lot out of a guy. So it’s little surprise (though it is a disappointment) that we haven’t seen more major work out of Art Spiegelman since his Pulitzer-winning Maus was completed in 1991. Yes, there have been random strips, New Yorker ...[MORE]