A Rebours is the St. Paul hot spot for A-list eaters, attracting the heavyweights of St. Paul politics, out-of-town talent like the cast of the Prairie Home Companion movie, and the usual crowd of the upwardly mobile and beautiful. The restaurant has every last sparkle you’d expect: tiled floors, high ceilings, gleaming wood, linen, and … Read more
These days, Bob Dylan scorns the camera (or claims to–who can explain that freaky Victoria’s Secret commercial?), but once upon a time he gladly tossed his winsome curls for the historical record. John Cohen, whose folk band the New Lost City Ramblers achieved success in the same New York music scene that nurtured the young … Read more
Daniel Kaniess and Yang Yang raise questions about the future of creativity–how will it evolve within the generations of kids who are growing up in front of their computers? Both ply a steely and futuristic vision infused with the influences of computer animation, video games, and industrial collage. Yet they also press the memory of … Read more
One of our favorite things about Ian Frazier is his ability to sketch scenes with deft strokes that instantly put you in a Montana trout stream, a Manhattan canyon, or a New Jersey boulevard. That, and he reliably evokes at least one belly laugh per one thousand words. Last winter, Frazier published Gone To New … Read more
The appearance of a new George Saunders story is always cause for excitement among his steadily growing cult. There really isn’t another contemporary American writer who has tapped so effectively into the absurdities that result from our current climate of cultural confusion. In the process, Saunders has carved out his own niche in unlikely places–the … Read more
Writing under the sly pseudonym Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler is the man responsible for the highly amusing A Series of Unfortunate Events, a string of bestselling tales for especially smart young readers–and for a large handful of slightly juvenile adult readers, the kind who take unabashed pleasure in bathroom humor and the satisfactions of revenge. … Read more
Today’s open adoptions give birth mothers a degree of peace of mind, as well as provide their children with a sense of identity that so often proved elusive to previous generations. But for much of the twentieth century, pregnant women were spirited off to strange and sometimes cruel places where they delivered and relinquished their … Read more
Sean Penn and Madonna did it; so did J-Lo and Ben Affleck. For some couples, love and ego swell together in such a way that a cinematic collaboration is inevitable. Now it’s Matthew Barney and Bjork’s turn–and we’re happy to say that the results are stranger and more spectacular than anything Hollywood would turn out. … Read more
Seven years in the making, Water has finally landed on our shores, and it was worth the wait. Shelved after its sets were destroyed by fundamentalist Hindis and the director Deepa Mehta’s life threatened, the production resumed years later in Sri Lanka with a new cast. Water is the story of Chuyia, a precocious eight-year-old … Read more
Next time you have the opportunity to make a bargain with a genie, just say no. And yet, you’ll probably say yes, no matter how many fairy tales you’ve read, because those spell ladies are just so darn persuasive. In this stylized Chinese romance, a poor orphan girl negotiates with a sorceress to become a … Read more