If you love the 33 1/3 series of pocket-sized book — you know, the ones analyzing/detailing classic albums — then chances are you’ll also love the new series of pocket-sized books focused on movie criticism aptly named Deep Focus. Soft Skull Press has only released two books in the series to date, author Jonathan Lethem [...]
Yes, critics are still important, no matter what the artistic field, as are curators. But I still don’t understand why there has to be a distinction between the dying professional critic and the amatuer-online type. There are many more professional online critics than this article gives credit for.
I want to heartily thank Janet Maslin of The New York Times from saving me the trouble of reading Dan Brown’s latest historical-consipiracy thriller The Lost Symbol. That is, of course, unless I get a strong bought of constipation and have to make friendly with long boring stretches on the can: ”Too many popular authors (Thomas [...]
History’s lens is often reduced to competing dialectics; the ease and comfort of simple black versus white explanations. It is the worst form of rewriting history. A prime example of this is the Civil Rights movement. For those people whose only experience of this time period is through a fifth-grade history book, one would suspect [...]
Obviously, we’ve been following the PPZ developments with a keen eye and ear and relaying that information back to you. We have our review copy sitting amongst a stack of other review copy books to get too. So we’re probably not going to have any sort of official review around here for some time. There’s [...]
“A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary” Being a self-proclaimed word nerd, this book initially piqued my interest several months ago when I saw it on the shelves of the ?Books about Books? section of my local booksellers. I acquired the necessary funds (usually from the dearth of Bookstore [...]
It should go without saying that we hold Julia Child near and dear to our hearts around these parts. And not the least because an entire network owns their existence to her. For us, it’s more personal. Growing up, there was something about her show (and to a lesser degree Yan Can Cook and Jeff [...]
Ralph Steadman is best known as the illustrator for Hunter S. Thompson. He does these wildly chicken scratch ink and watercoolers that are just mild melting. It’s truly like nothing else out there.But something you might have known is that Steadman is also a wine lover. Untrodden Grapes is part exploration of wine, part travelogue, [...]
When I’m looking for something breezy to read the first person I always ask for recommendations is my dad. The guy has read more detective fiction, more lawyerly novels, more “plausible” sci-fi actioners than just about anyone I know. I’m pretty convinced if he wanted to he could write one of these novels in his [...]
