Month: July 2002

This could be the most anticipated album of the year among Rakish readers. Let’s refresh our screens on Ms. Mann, shall we? When we last heard from her, she had conquered the world with her brilliant album Bachelor No. 2 — a wonderful, self-produced record that provided the inspiration for (and ultimately the soundtrack to)…

If you’re like us, you browse Amazon or Roadrunner, find great CDs to replace your classic vinyl, and suddenly get buyer’s remorse, right before the deed is done. But this is one of those collections that should break our longstanding habit of procrastination. It’s a piece of the secret history of rock ’n’ roll, the…

Do you know there are prophets in your midst? Steve Tibbetts is one of the planet’s most inventive electric guitarists, drummers, and tape manipulators—has been for more than 20 years and he makes his home right here in the Twin Cities. We’ve been fans in the wilderness ever since hearing a snippet of Exploded View…

If this isn’t enough rope for you, you need to seriously rethink what you’re planning to tie up. This 900-page expanded version of 1999’s Collected Mystery Stories gathers 83 short stories spanning the career of mystery master Block. He’s also a prolific novelist, but this tome is the best showcase for Block’s command of style;…

Alice Sebold’s first novel is the great Oprah’s Book Club selection that never was—an accessible, generous, finely observed essay on the question of what the dead want from the living. A 14-year-old girl, Susie Salmon, is raped and murdered at the outset; then commences many years of wandering, grieving, and yearning on both sides of…

What a strange animal is “performance poetry” or “spoken word” or the ubiquitous “poetry slam.” There was a time when, if you got up on a stage and took the mike and told a story, you were a standup comedian. If there was a podium in front of you, and you’d taken a few learned…