One way or another every local television news outfit hypes itself as Your News Leader. What they mean by this, of course, since only one station can be the actual leader, is that the kids in their PR departments have found creative ways to twist Nielsen numbers to make it appear as though they have … Read more
Melody Gilbert has always considered herself a global citizen of sorts, having worked in television and film everywhere from Wisconsin to Romania. But in 2001, her sportswriter husband Mark Wollemann landed a job at the Star Tribune, and the couple settled down in Minneapolis. That was when her work as a documentary filmmaker started to … Read more
Dan Slager was a wide-eyed college graduate when he moved in 1989 from his home state of Michigan to Manhattan with a futon tied to his car and “a sense that New York was where you went if you were interested in literary books.” He landed a job as an editorial assistant at William Morrow … Read more
Will Black Book mark Paul Verhoeven’s triumphant return? The guy behind such gut-wrenching “classics” as RoboCop, Basic Instinct, and Starship Troopers seemed to have the potential to become one of our most talked-about directors, a bastard hybrid of Sam Peckinpah and Fellini at his most indulgent. Then, however, his career slipped into the toilet with … Read more
Imagine that your casual evening walk has suddenly landed you in a minefield. That’s the kind of tension radiating from this acclaimed thriller, in which an unnamed woman is spirited off to a hotel room to wait (and wait some more) for orders—which are to detonate a bomb in Times Square. With tiny yet terrifying … Read more
In what many will call a “searing drama,” a dentist rekindles his friendship with a college classmate who lost his wife and child in the September 11th attacks. Don Cheadle plays Alan, a stable fellow who, like his suffering pal Charlie, has lost something of himself on the road to success. The two men play … Read more
Joe Boyd had his fingers in all sorts of music-history pies. While still in his early twenties and freshly graduated from Harvard, he served as Muddy Waters’ tour manager. Then, when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, it was a young Boyd who performed the fateful (and, some would claim, sacrilegious) … Read more
We’ve long suspected that Kurt Andersen is a fictional character, or rather, a consortium of writers and raconteurs doing business as Zeitgeist, Inc. How else to explain this purported Kurt Andersen’s cutting-edge sensibilities and sheer ubiquity? Surely no one man could juggle so many chain saws. According to the bio that accompanies Heyday, his latest … Read more
Some of our best storytellers served childhood apprenticeships sitting at the feet of master raconteurs. Rick Bragg’s familial memoirs—1997’s All Over but the Shoutin’ and 2001’s Ava’s Man—are nothing if not evidence of one such early initiation to the oral tradition. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his “elegantly written” New York Times features, … Read more
Pop culture has always played a huge role in Jonathan Lethem’s invented—and wildly inventive—world. He’s sort of the house DJ for a stable of like-minded contemporary writers, offering deft literary mash-ups of science fiction, hard-boiled detective stories, magical realism, and comic-book mythology. Lethem’s first novel since 2003’s Fortress of Solitude is a bit of a … Read more