I once punctuated a doomed love affair with a ride on the Empire Builder to Glacier National Park in Montana. It was my 25th birthday, and I spent it sighing deeply into a window-framed postcard of North Dakota, idly expecting the steel rails to yield some inspiration. Instead, I was deposited unceremoniously outside an RV … Read more
You cannot get a Mikael the Mime Happy Meal at your local drive-thru window. There are no Mikael the Mime pacifiers or chewable vitamins on sale at Target, and there are no Mikael the Mime video games that teach your pipsqueaks to blow up extra-terrestrials with a Mikael the Mime machine gun. Mikael Rudolph simply … Read more
Those few of us who spend our working lives in the Roman Empire find current events depressingly familiar. The superpowers of Late Antiquity, Rome and Persia, spent much of the half-millennium before the rise of Islam at war. The Persian Empire incorporated not only modern Iran, but also Iraq. The cockpit of imperial confrontation was … Read more
Happy Birthday to Me! The Rake is the oldest continuously published periodical in the English language, but it didn’t get to this venerable and celebrated position without sacrifices! You remember the Cedars of Lebanon? They provided the reams of paper that became our massive “Top Priests” issue of May, 501 AD. Atlantis? The island defaulted … Read more
At the heart of this new-in-paperback novel by the author of The Joy Luck Club lies the terrible fragility of memory-and how time robs us piece by piece of our own past. Her main characters are instantly recognizable Tan types. American-born writer Ruth Young realizes it’s time to mend fences with Alzheimer’s-beset mother, LuLing, before … Read more
When Michael Gordon uses the word “hero” to describe the 12 stylists he profiles, he’s not kidding. And although he’s not trying to place his subjects on the same level as, say, the firefighters of 9/11, they’re certainly at the top of the heap when it comes to the top of your head. There’s Kenneth … Read more
Right out of the gate, with her early novels The Bluest Eye and Sula, it was clear that Toni Morrison was a writer to be reckoned with, capable of powerfully articulating the rage and despair of black women trying to get by in a society permeated with both racism and sexism. Her big-league status was … Read more
If he were the protagonist in one of his own crime novels, Andrew Vachss might be unbelievable: A hard-as-nails lawyer, grizzled and sporting an eyepatch, who’ll only take cases defending child victims of sexual abuse. But his singleminded, furious crusade is for real, and it informs not just his writing but his whole life. Vachss … Read more
Northfield native Siri Hustvedt first caught our attention with her 1996 novel The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, a self-consciously quirky noir set in a small Minnesota town populated by a ditzy femme-fatale heroine and a cast of flaky eccentrics.What I Loved, her third book, chronicles the quarter-century friendship between a painter and an art historian … Read more
Sophomore slump is often nothing more than the indifference of critics and fans who are still digging the first record. Macy Gray got about as big as anyone can get with her 1999 debut, On How Life Is. The freak queen of rock ’n’ soul combined a Jimi Hendrix sense of style with a vocal … Read more