Author: Max Ross

  • Doomtree by Doomtree

    It seems sometimes like every debut rap album is long-awaited, highly anticipated. We heard the usual phrases a couple weeks ago on Muja Messiah‘s premier release ("They said this would never get done…I made it happen. I was part-time hustlin’, now I’m full-time rappin’ "). Likewise, in the liner notes to their new CD, the…

  • Chris Adrian's New Collection of Short Stories

    These angels are useless. The heavenly agents that populate Chris Adrian’s new story collection, A Better Angel, sit idly by their hapless wards, disappointed and impotent. Their existence, it seems, is incidental, and at times they are nothing more than a higher order of fuck-ups. Which somehow makes these angels strikingly believable. A trinity of…

  • A Rakish Interview with Minnesotan(-by-Proxy) Author Bart Schneider

    This is Minnesota. There’s Café Barbette, there’s Galactic Pizza, there’s the Armajani Bridge stretching from the Sculpture Garden to Loring Park. Except really it’s a month from now, the Republican National Convention is in town, and there’s a right-wing/neo-Nazi plot underway to kill three Jewish abortion doctors. This is the world of Bart Schneider’s new…

  • Reading This Post is Not Really Reading

    On the front page of yesterday’s New York Times is an article by Motoko Rich titled, "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?" It’s the first in a series that will explore "how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read." This installment focuses on the somewhat new debate…

  • Judging a Book by its (Back) Cover

    I’ve been taught to trust blurbs about as far as I can throw them, which is roughly about as far as I can throw a book, which is not very far, because I am quite weak, my muscles haveing been described as sauce-like. In fact, the word blurb seems related, if only alliteratively, to the…

  • Muja Messiah's Debut Album

    "Don’t wait for the critics to jump on this dude before you start giving it up," says everybody’s favorite Albino rhymer, Brother Ali. He’s speaking about Muja Messiah, the latest local rapper to make a big splash in the national underground hip-hop scene. "Muja is the shit. The man is right with his." So this…