Anthony Brandt The Man Who Ate His Boots

To boldly go where no scurvy-ridden, candle-eating man has gone before.

Books Don’t be misled by the catchy title of The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage (Alfred A. Knopf, 441 pages, $28.95). The book is far from a biograph ...   More

 

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 HENRY STERN

Mary Gaitskill Don’t Cry

Tales from the bloody, disembodied heart.

Books Mary Gaitskill’s stories have always been a long time coming; about a decade has separated each of Gaitskill’s collections since her now-classic 1988 debut, Bad Behavior. Grace Paley&mdash ...   More

 

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 MATTHEW KORFHAGE

Jake Adelstein Tokyo Vice

Of gaijin, gangsters and geisha.

Books Of course, Tokyo Vice (Pantheon, 335 pages, $26) begins with a threat. The dapper Japanese gangster (say it with me: ya-ku-za) ungently insinuates to the American reporter that unless he gives up on h ...   More

 

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 MATTHEW KORFHAGE

Wells Tower Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Stories to pillage by.

Books There’s a great moment in “Retreat,” a new short story by Wells Tower. Two brothers have been out deer hunting on a chilly island in Maine. They haven’t bagged anything, and th ...   More

 

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 JOHN MINERVINI

Nick Flynn The Ticking Is The Bomb

Torture ticks him off while his daughter’s on the way.

Books In 2007, writer Nick Flynn was one of a handful of artists asked by a team of lawyers to act as witnesses in the interviewing of Abu Ghraib ex-detainees. In his second memoir The Ticking Is the Bomb, ...   More

 

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 NATALIE BAKER

Elizabeth Gilbert Committed

The bother of being the bride.

Books Despite the seeming breach between her explorations of the masculine for Esquire and GQ and her two most recent, hypergabby love-lost-and-found memoirs, Elizabeth Gilbert has always written about what ...   More

 

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 MATTHEW KORFHAGE

The Neverending Story

Various bits of information about the Moth.

Books A brief intro: Storytelling is, of course, the oldest of arts—it’s the only way most of us understand anything, science included (tectonic plates become players in epic struggles, nova&rsq ...   More

 

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 MATTHEW KORFHAGE

William Langewiesche Fly By Wire

Books Accounts of collective feel-good moments being notoriously slushy, it is a relief when William Langewiesche’s Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson (Farrar, Straus and Gir ...   More

 

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 AARON MESH

Matthew Flaming The Kingdom of Ohio

The secret, sordid origins of...Toledo?

Books Life before the internal combustion engine was no damn fun. That, along with a vague sense of disquiet, is the thrust of The Kingdom of Ohio (Amy Einhorn Books, 322 pages, $24.95), the debut novel of ...   More

 

Wednesday, December 30, 2009 BEN WATERHOUSE

Profile: Jay Ryan

Meet the king of warm-and-fuzzy rock posters.