Month: February 2004

There’s a quintessential dichotomy about the American big city: a place where smart or lucky nobodies strike it rich, and where the unlucky and rootless get swallowed up. Larsen’s Devil In The White City, a finalist for the National Book Award, tells of two men of 1890s Chicago who embodied that split: Daniel Burnham, the…

One of Woody Allen’s funniest short stories involves a humanities professor who has a disastrous affair with Emma Bovary by magically transporting himself into Gustave Flaubert’s novel. Welsh writer Fforde takes this concept to a whole new level in his three very witty novels about Thursday Next, a detective who works the mean streets of…

Amy Tan is out on the lecture circuit in support of her new essay collection, The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. She’d rather be out in support of her fifth novel, but… Well, that’s one of the things she writes about in Fate: her fight against a rather nasty bout of Lyme disease,…

Long before Queer Nation and Niggaz With Attitude adopted the slurs of their oppressors as a show of unapologetic might, seventies country band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys were giving us Yid Kids up north proof that the goyim were more than people to give your lunch money to. Authentic country, the Texas Jewboys…

Any month that includes a new Block novel has at least one thing going for it. A master of both heavy drama and light comedy, Block’s capable of some powerful writing; at his peak, in a novel like When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, he can stand next to Raymond Chandler and stare him in the…

Now that Danticat, the youngest writer ever nominated for a National Book Award, is about to hit 35, maybe there’ll be less gushing about her age and more about her writing ability, which is considerable. The Haitian expat’s previous novel, The Farming of Bones, was a powerful account of a 1937 massacre in her homeland,…