In Boomsday, Buckley’s latest novel, the relentlessly topical humorist (and spawn of conservative doyen William F. Buckley) envisions a future in which bloggers are actually powerful enough to radically influence decisions at the highest level of American politics. Not so far-fetched, you might say, but Buckley’s penchant for taking aim at the broadest possible targets … Read more
At the annual Upper Midwest Foodservice and Lodging Show, which convened at the Minneapolis Convention Center a few weeks back, a fellow who was willing to do the legwork could have really gorged himself on meat. It seemed like somebody was handing out samples (“The Black Angus of Pork,” boasted the sign in one booth) … Read more
In Marnita Schroedl and Carl Goldstein’s Kenwood home it can be hard to decide where to sit. The living room contains a plush couch, a large oak dining table lined with a bench and six solid chairs, and a low table encircled by five squat stools. The sunroom in back has another couch, while still … Read more
You can find Mt. Holly on Google Maps, one lonely dot near the center of Shakopee. Zoom in and see that the city resides entirely on the corner of Third Avenue East and Holmes Street, across from the Scott County Jail. The town consists of a tidy 1940s bungalow and a single pine tree. Until … Read more
Kierkegaardians can have a mysterious sort of appeal, especially when you see some fifty of them gathered atop a windy hill on the southern Minnesota prairie. That was the situation a few weeks back, when a group of the world’s top scholars of the nineteenth-century philosopher converged to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the nearby … Read more
A rare opportunity to see one of America’s quietest—or at least lower-profile—literary lions. And judging from the man’s eclectic body of work, distinguished by its broad historical sweep and social criticism, it’s likely that Doctorow will have something of substance to say. Over a career that’s now spanned almost fifty years, Doctorow’s writing has consistently … Read more
Here’s a pairing with a curious backstory. Galway Kinnell, whose 1980 Selected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was touring in Northern England when he found himself at a reading by Josephine Dickinson, a deaf Oxford-educated poet, musician, composer, and teacher. More than a decade earlier, she had fallen in … Read more
You’d suppose a writer has to be pretty damn good, not to mention lucky, to warrant dust-jacket blurbs from not one but two Nobel laureates. The U.S. publication of Laura Restrepo’s Delirium carries ringing endorsements from José Saramago and Latin American luminary Gabriel García Márquez, and also comes on the heels of a slew of … Read more
Orson Welles did it, and Laurie Anderson, too. Now local director Jon Ferguson—best known for his 2005 hit, Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban—has taken up the challenge of adapting Melville’s epic for the stage. This is an undertaking that, he admits, could elude, haunt, and/or—much as with Captain Ahab—swallow him whole. Ferguson’s project got … Read more
On the occasion of its fifth Walker-commissioned production, Britain’s Improbable Theatre abandons the relative safety of such lavish puppetry spectacles as Shockheaded Peter and The Hanging Man (performed here in 2000 and 2003, respectively) and instead harks back to its roots in scrappy, improvisational object theater. Animo, therefore, is not so much a play as … Read more