Author: Brad Zellar

  • Do I Repeat Myself? Very Well, Then, I Repeat Myself

    For many months, on her way to and from school each day, Gloria had paused at the pet shop window to gaze with a combination of adoration and desire at the pretty little accordion nestled there in wood shavings and newspaper confetti. Each night at the dinner table she would beg her parents to let…

  • A Christmas Tale

    Every Christmas when I was a child, much of my extended family would gather at my grandparents’ farm outside a small town in Illinois. My own family would usually arrive early in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, and many other relatives who lived nearby would come out to the farm for dinner that night. My…

  • Bill Holm

    At this point Bill Holm probably qualifies as a literary lion. He looks the part, certainly (Garrison Keillor has described him as “the tallest radical humorist in the Midwest”), and has a pretty unconventional lifestyle by Minnesota lit standards. Holm is an outsized personality, yet he’s also something of an outstate recluse and a rambler.…

  • Jim Walsh

    To celebrate the publication of his labor of love/ oral history, The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting, longtime Twin Cities music critic and columnist Jim Walsh will be undertaking his own blitzkrieg, book-tour version of the Mats’ legendary ’85 five-night stand at the Entry. In the course of one week you’ll have a bunch…

  • Michael Tisserand with the Southside Aces

    In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, displaced Big Easy journalist Tisserand, the former editor of the estimable Gambit Weekly, has produced a truly inspiring and moving testament to the power of perseverance in the face of unimaginable exile. Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember is…

  • The (Perhaps Deservedly) Lost Recordings Of Burt Sikorski, DBA The Burt Sugar Trio

    Every town and city has its share of genuine characters and eccentrics, but I think you could say that it’s somewhat easier to get a real feel for the personalities of such characters in a smaller town, where there are so few public secrets and mysteries, and where what might be mere sidewalk spectacle in…