Author: rakemag

As a chronicler of the American West, Larry McMurtry has few rivals. He combines a gift for characterization with a sense of history’s sweep that makes his best work, like the Pulitzer winner Lonesome Dove, succeed as both regional saga and small-scale story of imperfect people in search of emotional connection. Wandering Hill picks up from last year’s Sin Killer to the story of the monumentally dysfunctional Berrybender family, British aristocrats who set out to carve out a niche in the 1830s frontier only to find that the frontier carves back. It’s a violent and bawdy black comedy that imagines the early days of white settlement in the West as disquietingly full of lunatics, hypocrites, and brutality—a dark evolution from earthy but uplifting novels like Dove and Terms of Endearment, and closer perhaps to T.C. Boyle or Little Big Man than what fans might be used to.

If your twin brother died in an accident that was probably your fault, and your father turned the incident into a farcical stage play that was the hit of the season, you’d probably have some issues about that. Angsty teen Judith Shakespeare is aghast when she runs across a draft of Twelfth Night, and hatches a plan to publicly shame dad on stage during the play’s first performance. Tiffany, an English professor and Shakespeare expert, uses Judith’s (mostly fictional) story to cast a light on the problems of smart, ambitious women in the Elizabethan age, and imaginatively recreates life at Shakepeare’s Globe Theater. But it might be most enlightening for her take on the private character of the Bard, still almost totally unknown despite the long shadow cast by his works.

If you only know these three novels by their Hollywood adaptations—well, then you’re not doing half bad, considering that they’d all rank high in just about anybody’s list of the top-ten all-time noir films. But the originals themselves are among the very best in his genre—however it is you define it. Despite Cain’s sainted place in the mystery canon, his novels are less crime stories than tales of dark psychology, populated by characters doomed by their own passions and mostly unable to sense impending destruction. For what it’s worth, Cain hated being pigeonholed among the detective set, and Raymond Chandler in turn thought he was a detestable vulgarian. (“But James Cain—faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. Such people are the offal of literature.”) If you’re a crime-novel buff, you’ll find this collection as sweet as sugar Cain. It also picks up five of his out-of-print short stories, each minor classics in the hardboiled tradition.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Erica Jong’s reputation and following were built on her frank depictions of sex—going all the way back to her debut in 1973, Fear of Flying. She still relies on that old trick, even as she indulges in the chic literary trend of the day, the historic novel. In Sappho’s Leap, Jong projects all kinds of ruminations on sexual identity onto Greek mythology. It’s an interesting cocktail of sacred and profane that ultimately must be judged on how well you can tolerate reading Sappho as essentially a bisexual swinger—minus the modern accouterments of, say, the jacuzzi and edible undies. Let the writer acquit herself—either at this reading or on KFAI’s “Write On Radio,” same day. Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com

When Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994, Paul McComas was as shocked as anyone that the man voted most likely to be the voice of his generation would choose eternal silence instead. Unlike the rest of us, McComas actually did something about it. Himself a lifetime victim of depression, the Chicago writer devoted himself to suicide prevention both in his fiction and in a program called Rock Against Depression. His first novel, Unplugged, imagines a Cobain-like musician gets an unexpected second chance to change her mind. As a prose stylist, McComas is no Shakespeare, but his writing is intensely emotional, and in this case there’s something to be said for having your heart in the right place. Plus, we hear he’s a dynamic speaker, so his Ruminator gig might be well worth your time.

Eustace Conway is self-sufficient in ways most of us wouldn’t want to be even if we knew how, in the way almost no American has been since the days of Daniel Boone. The star of Gilbert’s marvelous nonfiction The Last American Man lives on a thousand-acre patch of woods in Appalachia, literally living off the land and making his clothes out of deerskin. He’s a man born 200 years out of time whose soul belongs to the forest. And yet for all his supreme competency as a woodsman, his life is also a holding action against encroaching modernity—developers slowly encircle his land, and the bureaucratic vultures of taxation and insurance do too. Gilbert’s anecdotes are so colorful that they sometimes strain disbelief, and yet it would be a tremendous shame if they weren’t true. For instance: Once while climbing a mountain, Conway slipped and fell, rocketing helplessly down an icy slope toward certain death over a 2,000-foot cliff. He was saved at the last moment when his body slammed into the frozen carcass of a mule that had died within arm’s length of the cliff’s edge. Now that’s just too cool.

Even in the age of Xbox, kids of a certain age can still be utterly transfixed by a good old-fashioned circus. Maybe the older and more jaded can be brought back into the tent with this supercool exhibit about the science behind acrobatics, high-wire walking, the trapeze, and all manner of circus daredevilry. The attraction is, of course, that the kids get to try some of this stuff themselves—with plenty of coaching and safety equipment, to be sure. Science Museum, 120 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul, (651) 221-9444, www.smm.org

If you combined the directorial styles of Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, and the bloody Grand Guignol of early Peter Jackson in one guy, you might have something like Japan’s Takashi Miike. Except maybe that he makes more films than they do—an astonishing four dozen in the last decade, usually horror and yakuza gangster movies. But he doesn’t do anything simply, and girds his stories with plenty of surrealism, black comedy, and shockingly frank sex and violence—these might be too intense for the Greek Wedding set. The Walker screens four of his recent films, the most accessible of which might be The Happiness of the Kakaturis, a musical comedy about an eccentric family in a zombie-plagued hotel that’s like a weird cross of Charles Addams, Baz Luhrmann, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Walker, 725 Vineland Place, (612) 375-7622, walkerart.org