Author: Brad Zellar

  • One More Cup of Coffee for the Road: In Another Lifetime

    Long, long ago, in the sweltering twilight of an August night roaring with cicadas and the vacuum hum of a lazy small town in retreat from the heat and the falling darkness, the yards and sidewalks abandoned for living rooms and television sets (the wobbling blue screens of which we could see through the dark,…

  • Another One from the Mothballs: The Art of Indexing

    I always thought it would be interesting to attempt to tell the story of your life purely in index form. I tried it once, without a whole lot of success. I’m sure there are others out there like me, though, people for whom the indexes of thick biographies are often better and more fascinating reading…

  • Any Old Business?

    How it is that I…how is it…or, rather, why it is that I…that I seem to keep…or, really, that I do keep, that I keep ending up…that every single night I look at the clock, I look at the clock and it’s two o’clock in the morning, it’s three o’clock in the morning and I…I…

  • In Which I Take Umbrage

    I opened my electronic correspondence this morning to discover that, scattered among the many missives from such devoted readers as Floyd Whopping Cock, there were a number of notes from acquaintances calling my attention to the fact that in the pages of the Southwest Journal local media rascal David Brauer was weighing in on the…

  • Ali Selim and Will Weaver Discuss Sweet Land

    St. Paul filmmaker Ali Selim’s Sweet Land, a Minnesota-made indie labor of love that garnered critical acclaim and spawned a minor cult, was adapted from Bemidji writer Will Weaver’s 1989 short story “A Gravestone Made of Wheat.” The Rake’s Cristina Córdova will moderate the latest installment of The Talk of the Stacks series, as the…

  • Richard Price

    Bronx born and bred, Richard Price is arguably the country’s grittiest version of a zeitgeist Renaissance man. Following his first two novels The New York Times Book Review dubbed him “The Fonzi of Literature,” which may or may not have been intended as a compliment. But if early Price seemed like a flyweight greaseball with…