Daniel Weir used to be a famous — not to say infamous — rock star. Maybe still is. At thirty-one he has been both a brilliant failure and a dull success. He's made a lot of mistakes that have paid off and a lot of smart moves he'll regret...
Cat and Mouse was the book G?nter Grass wrote immediately after The Tin Drum, and it shares its setting with that earlier novel: Danzig during World War II. But while The Tin Drum achieves its extraordinary cumulative effect through the sprawling...
A commonplace book, arranging works of criticism looking at Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with fragments of memoir/fiction. Presented first as random notes on watching Hitchcock, the fragments soon take up multiple narratives and threads and, like a...
Once an example of American industrial might, Detroit has gone bankrupt, its streets dark, its storefronts vacant. Miles of city blocks lie empty, saplings growing through the cracked foundations of abandoned buildings.
In razor-sharp, beguiling...
“This Chance Planet” by Elizabeth Bear is a near future science fiction story about a young Russian waitress with ambitions to become an engineer and her musician boyfriend, who wants her to gestate a liver for money so his band can tour. Plus,...
A provocative novel about the fallout from a search for truth by the author of the national bestseller The Lifeboat.
For Maggie Rayburn-wife, mother, and secretary at a munitions plant-life is pleasant, predictable, and, she assumes, secure....
It is 1958 and the Phelan clan has gathered to hear Peter Phelan's will, read by the living Peter himself, an artist whose paintings about members of the family have given him belated critical recognition. The paintings illuminate the lives of his...