On the Plains by Peter Brown DoubleTakeBooks/Norton, 131 pp., $39.95 It is possible to drive from Fort Stockton, Texas, to South Dakota without passing through a town of more than a few thousand people — that is the territory that is captured in this very fine and subtle book. On the Plains is a visual […]
Off the Bookshelf
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Off the Bookshelf
The Faeries’ Oracle: Working With the Faeries to Find Wisdom, Insight, and Joy by Brian Froud and Jessica Macbeth Simon & Schuster, $25 Faery artist Brian Froud, with the help of writer Jessica Macbeth, has put together his own set of divining cards, using images of all manner of faeries, from knobby trolls to graceful […]
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At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 82 pp., $10 (paper) Originally released in 1983, At the Bottom of the River is a lyrical collection of some of Jamaica Kincaid’s most provocative writing. It begins innocently enough with one of Kincaid’s most impacting writings, Girl. Tattooed in my memory […]
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Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 162 pp., $10 (paper) For those whose appetite for the written word has them reading the backs of shampoo bottles and cereal boxes for a fix, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, a humorous field guide to the culture and […]
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Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story edited by Adrienne Brodeur and Samantha Schnee Harcourt, 356 pp., $14 (paper) If, as Francis Ford Coppola’s three-year-old quarterly asserts in its masthead, Zoetrope: All Story were truly “all story,” and not Zoetrope: Mostly Stories and a Few Self-Aggrandizing Essays on Crafting/Peddling Our Screenplays in These Terrible Times, this debut […]
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Tulsa by Larry Clark Grove Press, 64 pp., $24.95 (paper) Diary by Corinne Day Kruse Verlag, 112 pp., $50 Twenty-nine years after it went out of print, Tulsa, recently reissued, still has the power to make you wince. Clark, who would later go on to direct the equally cringe-worthy film Kids, grew up in the […]
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Apocalypse Culture II edited by Adam Parfrey Feral House, 468 pp., $18.95 (paper) Parfrey has been obsessed with “far-reaching and extreme societal tendrils” for years now. Apocalypse Culture II is his roundup of sociopathology for the new millennium. It’s all in here: Ted Kaczynski’s rambling myth-laden manifesto, tales from the Real Doll factory where they […]
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Gil Elvgren: All His Glamorous American Pin-Ups edited by Charles G. Martignette & Louis K. Meisel Taschen, 272 pp., $39.99 This thorough collection of Elvgren’s work goes well beyond his cheesecake work, detailing how an arousing nude could later be painted over to become merely a cutie hawking Coke. However, the emphasis certainly is on […]
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Adam Sandler: America’s Comedian by Bill Crawford St. Martin’s Griffin, 173pp., $11.95 (paper) Adam Sandler: America’s Comedian is a great work of literature … for me to poop on! Author Bill Crawford, who co-wrote the gripping Stevie Ray Vaughan biography Caught in the Crossfire, seems like a perfect choice to tackle America’s favorite coprophiliac (and […]
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The Map of Love: A Novel by Ahdaf Soueif Anchor, 516 pp., $14 (paper) Isabel Parkman opens a trunk, and that is how Ahdaf Soueif’s glorious novel, The Map of Love, begins. The trunk had belonged to Isabel’s great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne, and while Isabel sifts through its contents, exclaiming “over the daintiness of the smocking […]
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Louse: A Novel by David Grand Harvest Books, 272 pp., $13 (paper) And you think your job sucks. Meet Herman Q. Louse, personal valet and indentured servant to a drug-addicted, hyperphobic loon named Poppy who more than slightly resembles Howard Hughes. Poppy commands a kingdom of casinos; those who lose to the house usually end […]
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Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art, 1900-1950 edited by Beth Venn and Adam D. Weinberg University of California Press, 224 pp., $29.95 (paper) They should have called it Behind the Art: The Making of the Whitney Museum. Frames of Reference is divided into three sections: a charming biography of Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who […]