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Invisible playmates

Paul Auster makes promiscuity a virtue
To judge from the titles of some of his recent novels — The Book of Illusion s, Oracle Night , Man in the Dark , and now Invisible — Paul Auster's fiction is receding, Samuel Beckett style, into non-existence.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 18, 2009

Magic tricks

Alice Munro has them, Philip Roth doesn’t
You have to give a seventysomething writer credit for daring to begin a book with “He’d lost his magic.”

By ED SIEGEL | November 11, 2009

Mystic muso

The erudition of Robert Palmer
“America’s Pre-eminent Music Writer Dead at 52” was the headline on Robert Palmer’s obituary in Rolling Stone after his liver failed in 1997.

By TED DROZDOWSKI | November 04, 2009

Brutal truths

Hilary Mantel’s Booker winner
To call a 560-page novel “spare” sounds ridiculous. But though Wolf Hall is both lengthy and dense, this book — essentially a character study of the 16th-century statesman Thomas Cromwell — is also as close to bare-bones writing as one can imagine, a stark and unsentimental triumph.

By CLEA SIMON | November 02, 2009

Apocalypse wow

Margaret Atwood unleashes the End Times
At the start of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood , mankind is heaving its last gurgling sighs.

By SHAULA CLARK | October 20, 2009

Sarah and the shipmates

Vowell on the Puritans and the founding of Rhode Island
Humorist, historian, superhero. Sarah Vowell is a woman of letters and voices.

By MICHAEL ATCHISON | October 22, 2009

Graphic Traffic

A sweet crop of graphic narratives
Comics. Graphic novels. Sequential-art books. Call them what you will, but there are more of them than ever.

By MIKE MILIARD | October 16, 2009

Whatchamacallit

Jack Pendarvis's not quite mot juste
John Gardner, the great teacher and novelist who wrote approximately 413 books before annihilating himself on a motorcycle in 1982, was very big on vocabulary.

By JAMES PARKER | October 15, 2009

Slideshow: Inside today's graphic novels

An exclusive look into a collection of graphic novels
Images from graphic novels like World War 3 , Drunk , Asterios Polyp , and more.

By PHOENIX STAFF | October 14, 2009

Carnal knowledge

Nick Cave’s bad Bunny
When I interviewed Nick Cave for the Phoenix three years ago and he told me — drolly, languidly, literarily — that his next writing project was about “a sexually incontinent hand-cream salesman” on the south coast of England, I assumed he was taking the piss.

By JAMES PARKER | October 06, 2009

It's hip to be icosahedral

In a new book, Ethan Gilsdorf tracks his global quest to visit the holiest nerd-world sites
Be they beer geeks, comic-book geeks, or music geeks, nowadays people flout their geekdom proudly, even wearing it like a badge.

By MIKE MILIARD | October 05, 2009

Hans Rickheit versus the novel

Exploding Cow Dept.
In high-school English class, we're taught that literature features three basic types of conflict: man versus man, man versus environment, and man versus himself.

By MIKE MILIARD | September 30, 2009

Loss leader

Jill McCorkle's joyful sorrow
The stories in Jill McCorkle's new collection are about the battle to stay conscious and be truthful with yourself — to live beyond illusion.

By SUSAN CHAMANDY | September 30, 2009

Interview: Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall on her new book, North Korea, and Bible-thumping conservatives
If only there were more trees to be torn down, we could utilize them . . . to fill newspapers with the endless depressing stories out there about the environment and all its hapless inhabitants.

By LANCE GOULD | September 23, 2009