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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

Rolling stoned

Jonathan Lethem’s freewheeling Chronic City
Every new gambit is just another log on the roaring bonfire of Jonathan Lethem's eighth novel.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | November 04, 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

Learning curve

Maine novelist teases our brains
Maine novelist teases our brains

By DEIRDRE FULTON | September 23, 2009

No assignments here

An enjoyable reading list
Need a break from all that required reading this fall? You're in luck. In

By DEIRDRE FULTON | September 16, 2009

Victorian jewel

A fictional setting that never fades
What price beauty? That's the question lovely Grace Hammer has to answer as her world begins to fall apart.

By CLEA SIMON | September 09, 2009

Jessica Anthony's pleasantly disturbing Convalescent
There are probably 10 or 15 reviews I could write of Jessica Anthony's The Convalescent . Leitmotifs populate the book's 240 pages like thick, black hairs on the back of an old man's wrinkled ass.

By SAM PFEIFLE | September 02, 2009

Visible man

Tracy Kidder gets into the picture
As Tracy Kidder’s immersive journalism matures — his latest book recounts his travels through genocidal East Africa — he becomes more visible.

By JEFF INGLIS | October 15, 2009

Hot Nazi beach reads

The new wave of Reich books: pop genres, good Germans
Nazis aren't blitzing just the movie screens this year, though — they're also invading the bookstores, with battalions of novels and non-fiction tomes published or upcoming.

By PETER KEOUGH | August 18, 2009

Interview: Joseph Finder

True fiction
"Since 9/11, thousands of CIA employees have quit to go private. Basically, these guys are private spies."

By CLEA SIMON | August 18, 2009

Lacking magic

Richard Russo's latest slice of life is too thin
There's a lot to be said for literary realism, which tackles head-on the quotidian realities that postmodernism and surrealism often cloak in gimmicks or avoid altogether. Maine author (and Portland Phoenix reader fave) Richard Russo is nothing if not a realist; his previous novels portray believable characters navigating familiar, relatable scenarios.

By DEIRDRE FULTON | July 29, 2009

Surf bored

Little virtue in Pynchon's Inherent Vice
Paranoia isn't what it used to be — not for Thomas Pynchon, at any rate.

By PETER KEOUGH | July 28, 2009

Extreme Reads

The Phoenix beach-reading four-pack delivers sex, drugs, and rock and role — plus black-market human organs!
Reading on the beach is a rite of summer as treasured as slathering on globs of coconut oil and squatting in front of a tanning mirror. Of course, five out of five dermatologists recommend that you read this special collection of book excerpts indoors — but that’s where we decided to draw the line.

By PHOENIX STAFF | July 22, 2009

The End of the Long Summer

Why we must remake our civilization to survive on a volatile Earth
In this nonfiction treatise about global warming and other ecological dangers, the author details why our environment is in much worse shape than we thought. In this excerpt, Dianne Dumanoski notes that, far from taming Mother Nature, our factories and habits have only enraged her, which could lead to Earth's inability to sustain life. In other words, we're all gonna die — enjoy your summer!

By DIANNE DUMANOSKI | July 22, 2009

Larry's Kidney

Being the true story of how I found myself in China with my black-sheep cousin and his mail-order bride, skirting the law to get him a transplant — and save his life
In this nonfiction account pretty accurately described by the book's subtitle, Daniel Asa Rose accompanies his nebbishy but mobbed-up relative on a mission for a Chinese two-fer: to get the organ he desperately needs and — why not, as long as we're here? — a wife, to boot. In this excerpt, the author first hears about his cousin's dubious — and, according to Chinese law, illegal — plan.

By DANIEL ASA ROSE | July 22, 2009

It Feels So Good When I Stop

In this excerpt, the protagonist recalls his post-college years, in which he worked a crappy job at a restaurant owned by a racist.
In the winter of 1994, I graduated from UMass after four and a half years with a BA in English. I did pretty average; a lot worse than I might have done if I had given the tiniest of fucks about school. I decided to dick around until the summer and not think about my limited prospects, my withering University Health Insurance, and the looming crush of student-loan repayment.

By JOE PERNICE | July 22, 2009

The Accidental Billionaires

The founding of Facebook: A tale of sex, money, genius, and betrayal
In this nonfiction account of the Harvard origins of the social-networking phenomenon, the author boils down the essence of why Facebook — orginially called thefacebook — was created and the root of its power: nerds obsessing over sex. In this excerpt, undergrads Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg begin to realize that Facebook is indeed their golden ticket.

By BEN MEZRICH | July 22, 2009

The Market Messiah

How Sam Walton changed America
Many Americans feel as if they'd been living helplessly amid the handiwork of extraterrestrials, as if a spaceship had suddenly blown in and zapped the landscape with suburban sprawl while sucking up middle-class wages in exchange for low-paid service work.

By CATHERINE TUMBER | July 07, 2009

Deep impact

Ron Currie Jr. has a blast with the apocalypse once more
In the most memorable piece in Waterville author Ron Currie Jr.'s 2007 debut short story collection, God is Dead (Viking), God is reincarnated as a Dinka woman in a refugee camp in Sudan, who enlists a jive-talking Colin Powell in an effort to find a young boy.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | July 01, 2009