After the radiation treatments, my mother wanted only green bananas. Bananas that weren’t even fruit yet, not a drop of sweetness throughout. “These I can taste,” she said. “My tongue has all but died.” She hadn’t died. Yet. Although she was past bargaining with God, she still wanted to barter with me. She would try … Read more
One morning last summer, leaving my apartment on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, I noticed there weren’t many people outside. It was a fine June day, but there wasn’t the usual line of cars in front of Starbucks. No commuters schlepping insulated mochas, no dog walkers, no window washers at Cafe Latté, and no one … Read more
A gauntlet of black-and-white portraits of jazz luminaries lines the walls of the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant on the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. Nearly all of these musicians have appeared at the Dakota in one of its two incarnations. The trick with this sort of self-promotion-as-interior-decoration is in the execution. To do it … Read more
So, it sucks to park the car on Hennepin Avenue in the winter – scaling the piles of snow hardened into ice, trying not to fall against (or under) the filthy auto, hoping that busses and SUVs will not take the car door off (or at least slow down if they do) when you get … Read more
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I drove out to Giapponese, the new sushi bar / restaurant in Woodbury. Sushi is everywhere these days, including the refrigerator cases of local supermarkets, and since the sushi restaurants all tend to get the same ingredients from the same suppliers, it has become a pretty generic … Read more
Flynn’s debut about growing up in 1970s San Francisco with a paranoid schizophrenic mother sounds like the sort of overwrought therapy masquerading as literature we’ve been inundated with for years—but it’s actually as convincing as it is harrowing, and is ultimately a beautiful testament to the remarkable resilience of children and the power of imagination … Read more
Charles Baxter, whom we’re happy to once again claim as a local (he recently returned from a long exile in Ann Arbor) has been at it for twenty-five years now, and his body of work—which includes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays—has gained both a national reputation and a cult following. His novel The Feast … Read more
This is apparently what we’ve come to: In an age when we’re reminded on an almost daily basis that nobody reads books anymore, one of the biggest celebrities in publishing is a guy who designs book jackets. That, of course, would be Chip Kidd, the graphic designer with a classic quarterback’s name. You’d think maybe … Read more
Not since the Brontës bulled their way to prominence in nineteenth-century Duluth has the flyover cultural set seen a distaff literary dynasty—or, quite honestly, any sort of literary dynasty—the likes of the Erdrich sisters. By now everybody knows Louise (independent bookstore owner and author of the award-winning Love Medicine and all sorts of other critically … Read more
Believe me, I fully recognize that a guy pretty much has to be a moron and a glutton for punishment to criticize Diablo Cody at this point. Either that or he has to be a very, very brave man, a man with the stones of Anton Chigurh. I’ll plead absolutely guilty on the first counts. … Read more