Diane Vadino | Smart Girls Like Me
It’s true that Betsy Nilssen, the heroine of Diane Vadino’s debut novel, is a messy, irreverent New Yorker who works in fashion and is clever, confused, and alone. And this is indeed a satire about almost-boyfriends and urban isolation. But Smart Girls transcends the de facto genre categorizations that have become every young coming-of-age writer’s worst nightmare. A 24-year-old assistant editor at a fashion dot-com, Betsy is preparing for several things at once: the end of the world, a quarter-life crisis, and the loss of her steely, alluring best friend. Smart Girls can’t be masked as anything but a book about a girl, her friend, and a boy, though Vadino is too skilled a storyteller to apologize for that. Instead, she forsakes literary gimmicks for the confidence to say the things that one wishes to say the most.
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Holy spirit of the saxophone, Denis Johnson’s war, Mixed book bag, More 
- Holy spirit of the saxophone
John Coltrane died 40 years ago this past July at the age of 40 of liver cancer.
- Denis Johnson’s war
Denis Johnson has given us so many maimed and suffering souls in the past 25 years, he could fill a trauma ward.
- Mixed book bag
It looks like a good season run-up to beach reads, with new fiction from Denis Johnson and Aleksandar Hemon, biographies of Gabriel García Márquez and Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John Updike's final collection of poetry.
- Getting it live
Noah Preminger — bearded, shaggy-haired, 23 years old — plays tenor saxophone like a man at least twice his age while remaining completely of the moment.
- In action
In the era of YouTube, we’re apt to forget that not every note of music ever played has been captured on film or video.
- Permanent shuffle
Every year the box sets reshuffle jazz history.
- The anxiety of influence
“I’m playing changes!” That’s what a young jazz-pianist acquaintance of mine announced exultantly to one of his musical buddies back in the early ’70s.
- Personal code
The connection between jazz and India is at least as old as John Coltrane’s composition named for that country.
- Mining the past
John Coltrane acid blasts rage through the Mars Volta’s new The Bedlam in Goliath.
- Seven layers of heaven
Working on the fly, the organizers created an odd layer cake.
- Love and war
Shakespeare might have subtitled All’s Well That Ends Well (presented by Actors’ Shakespeare Project at Cambridge Family YMCA Theater through May 14) Smart Women, Foolish Choices .
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Books
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, Media, Jesus Christ, Books, Poetry, University of California-Berkeley, Adolf Hitler, Norman Mailer, Van Halen, Ben Ratliff, John Coltrane, Less
