Famous for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Shipping News, Proulx’s carved out a literary niche chronicling the lives of down-and-out communities all across North America—Newfoundland in Shipping, New England in Postcards, and now the Texas Panhandle in Ace. The story is something like the film Local Hero as it might have been told by Flannery O’Connor … Read more
It’s difficult not to connect the dots from Robert Crumb to Daniel Clowes. Crumb’s raw, realistic figures, oozing desperate human emotion (unrequited lust, mostly) spawned numer-ous other writer/illustrators like Clowes, Chris Ware, Johnny Ryan, Dave Cooper and Charles Burns that have have expanded comics beyond the green tights and trusty sidekicks that came before. Caricature … Read more
Appropriately enough, Sam Fuller’s life sounds like something out of the movies. The director of such great cult noir films as Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss penned this autobiography in the months before his death in 1997. Fuller grew up a poor Jewish kid in New York, raised by his strong-willed, widowed mother, and … Read more
Though he’s scored with things like Disclosure and TV’s ER, Michael Crichton inevitably returns to the theme that’s served him so well so often before, Science Run Amok. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the robot gunslingers in Westworld, the virus in Andromeda Strain (We could go on; he certainly did) are joined by the villain … Read more
Coffee House Press has certainly been double-dosed on caffeine—or something—in the past year. One of our favorite local publishing houses just seems to go from strength to strength. Norah Labiner’s Miniatures got widespread acclaim (and even got thrown up on by the office cat, a special distinction we won’t go into here) and the world … Read more
Once, when my daughter Sophie was about two years old, I dragged her to a big, noisy birthday party at Circus Pizza, where she had been on only one previous occasion. That, too, was for a big, noisy birthday party about a year and a half before. When we arrived at the second party, Sophie … Read more
After a couple of accidental clicks of the mouse the other day, I realized that I have officially seen enough naked people in my life. This does not mean that I never want to have sex again, or that I don’t want to see the person who I currently see naked all the time naked … Read more
“Courage, friends,” said George Bernard Shaw. “We all hate Christmas.” These days there is a good deal more to hate about the festive season than there was in Edwardian England, particularly the annual crash-course in consumerism given to all our children by the manufacturers of worthless plastic gewgaws. No doubt the hairy Hibernian sophisticate disdained … Read more
As a blond, long-braided German girl, my mother was in charge of going to the bakery for the family. During Christmas, the most magical time, some German traditions hold that the world itself is transformed, that angels dance all around, and heavenly music accompanies the softly falling snow. Yet only the true of heart witness … Read more
I’ve been doing some work lately that’s forced me to become at least casually reacquainted with pop music, a reunion that distresses me as if I were being dosed with booze after a happy stretch of sobriety. For the past three or four years, I have sheltered myself from developments in music, and have enjoyed … Read more