The Rake Magazine

In the wake of the tsunami, some well-intentioned Americans looked into adopting orphaned children. Perhaps they should read Jan Jeong Trenka’s memoir, The Language of Blood, before buying a ticket to Jakarta. “Remember that your joy as a parent is a direct result of your child’s first loss,” Trenka cautions adoptive parents. A Korean-born child … Read more

Odell takes up the sympathies of two mothers on opposite sides of the racial divide, who are connected by grief as they deal with the loss of their sons and watch the dawn of the desegregation era come to their small Mississippi town. Odell once had a successful corporate career. He tossed it, and almost … Read more

When U.S. publishers give teenagers book deals, there’s usually some hard partying in the pages. Snow White follows that rule–to the consternation of book-loving Poland, which reluctantly nominated the then-nineteen-year-old Maslowska for the Nike Prize, its highest literary honor. Maslowska’s tale of addiction and self-destruction is so brutal it has been compared to Irvine Welsh’s … Read more

For Chang, hip-hop isn’t just a reigning musical genre; it’s a rising force getting ready to reshape the nation. As a co-founder of the influential hip-hop label Solesides and producer of groups like the Ghetto Prophets, the man knows firsthand the power of the beat to change culture, politics, and society. One of the nation’s … Read more

For those of us who think Tom Stoppard is the greatest English playwright since Shakespeare, the DVD release of the movie of his first play has been eagerly anticipated since that date about six years ago when we put it on our Amazon wish list. The 1967 play introduced Stoppard’s conceit of a play within … Read more

Every Ramones fan knows the band was made up of weirdos. That’s a big part of why we loved them. Joey was a beanpole geek, Johnny a mop-topped grump, Dee Dee a streetwise cartoon boyÑthey were a lot like the screwed-up teenagers that we were. Of course, they also blew away the reigning “classic rock” … Read more

We saw Adrian Brody coming from a long way away, ever since King of the Hill. It’s not just his charm (his ads for Ermenegildo Zegna make us weak in the knees); his talent leads him to play characters who are subject to a heartbreaking array of misfortunes, humiliations, and trials. Here he plays Jack … Read more

The only woman I ever knew who was truly serious about plucking her eyebrows—or at least would admit it—was a long-ago girlfriend of my dad’s. This was the 1970s. She plucked and pulled with persistence, until there wasn’t much hair left. Then she’d take an eyebrow pencil, heat it with a match, and sketch on … Read more

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