Category: So Little Time

Minnesota in early February is the perfect place and time for some intelligent and effervescent pop to quicken our winter-slogged minds and brighten our outlooks across the snow-covered prairie. The chance to hear ex-Split Enz frontman (and Crowded House cohort) Tim Finn spin flax into gold while reprising the magical realism of his latest solo…

Regarding Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography (available January 8)— we’re curious about what the old man has to say, and we’re hoping for wardrobe and grooming tips, along with colorful yarns about outlasting ten American presidents. Plus, how can you resist a two-colon title? … As long as we’re pimping atheists and communists,…

Having adopted an alias, Michael Frame, the character at the center of My Revolutions is living a carefully constructed life of suburban mediocrity, hiding his radical history from a capitalist career wife and a stepchild who dreams of nothing more romantic than a gig as a corporate lawyer. As always seems to happen in such…

The history of literature—up to and including the stuff piled on the new arrivals tables at your local bookstore—is crammed with oddballs and anachronisms. That said, it’s still a rare novel that can take such raw materials and make something truly funny, compelling, and moving out of them. Based on the early reports, Tod Wodicka’s…

Hot on the heels of the birth of Christ comes yet another assault on religious belief. God knows, the godless have been on the pop culture offensive of late (see: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Philip Pullman et al.), and if the other side of the barricades didn’t have such an overwhelming historical foothold, you could…

File this one under “can’t miss.” Zadie Smith asked a bunch of literary cohorts to contribute to her latest project. Her only rule: Each story must bear the name of a person, and be about that person. The result is a broad-ranging collection of characters (a giant, a judge, and a monster, to name a…