E. P. Thompson PM Press ($32.95) by Paul Buhle A massively popular figure in his British homeland, with his 1963 tome The Making of the English Working Class still widely considered a foundation stone of modern learning, E. P. Thompson was known across the world from the 1950s until his 1993 death also as a global peacenik, anti-nuclear […]
Laura Lee Gulledge Amulet Books ($9.95) by Stephen Burt The plot in this perfectly crush-worthy graphic novel couldn't be simpler: Paige Turner (don't snicker: her mom and dad wanted a writer) has moved from bucolic Virginia to Brooklyn Heights, halfway through tenth grade. She's sad to leave her best friend in Charlottesville, but happy to […]
Dave McKean Fantagraphics Books ($35) by Greg Baldino The difference between erotica and pornography, someone once said, is that the job of erotica is to turn the reader on, while pornography is designed to get them off. It’s a tricky game to play with someone you know, let alone an unknown reader; often times, one […]
by Sarah Peters The garage at 3310 15th Avenue S. looks like any other in South Minneapolis. It has a wide bluish-grey door with prominently placed house numbers and sits next to a tidy wooden fence that encloses the adjacent yard. If you were walking by on your way to Powderhorn Park you probably would […]
AMONG PENGUINS A Bird Man in Antarctica Noah Strycker Oregon State University Press ($19.95) THE EXULTANT ARK A Pictoral Tour of Animal Pleasure Jonathan Balcombe University of California Press ($34.95) LET THEM EAT SHRIMP The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea Kennedy Warne Island Press ($25.95) LISTED Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act […]
by Stuart Hopen In the 1930s, a combination of cheap paper and cheaper thrills unleashed a volcano of creativity. This was the age of the pulp magazine, the quintessential literature of the Great Depression and fertile breeding ground of a uniquely American mythology. Digging through this now ancient archive, one finds the ancestors of the […]
HAYWIRE Thaddeus Rutkowski Starcherone Books ($18) by Elizabeth Moore Haywire, Thaddeus Rutkowski’s autobiographical third novel, delivers the dark and humorous moments of the life of a Polish-Chinese-American boy growing up in 1970s Appalachia; it is an insistent, nearly aggressive, reminder that the combinations of mixed race individuals and the struggles they encounter are limitless. Add […]
HAYWIRE Thaddeus Rutkowski Starcherone Books ($18) by Vincent Czyz Faulkner’s now-famous quip about Ernest Hemingway—“he has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary”—was just as famously rebutted by Papa: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” In Thaddeus Rutkowski’s Haywire we get the worst […]
by Daniela Gioseffi Sapphire is among the most uncompromising African-American writers of our time—a poet and novelist who understands racism at its core and women's rights as essential democracy. Before her novel Push (Knopf, 1996) was adapted for the screen as Precious, it won the Book of the Month Club Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the […]
by Paula Bomer Jen Michalski is the author of the short story collection Close Encounters (So New Media Press, 2007) and the editor of City Sages: Baltimore (CityLit Press, 2010). In 2010 her novella May/September won Press 53’s award for best novella and was subsequently published in Press 53 Open Awards Anthology 2010 ($16). The story of a very young woman and a […]