Arts >>

Books

K is for clown

The lighter side of global annihilation
The lighter side of global annihilation

By CLIF GARBODEN | June 30, 2009

Mainstream life, good read
Among Shawn Levy's books is one of my favorite film bios, King of Comedy , with crazy-guy Jerry Lewis, so show-off goofy and schmaltzy, spilling all on every exuberant, excessive page.

By GERALD PEARY | June 24, 2009

Endurance Reads

Summer-Book Therapy Sessions
Beach reading . The very phrase is abhorrent to book lovers, connoting as it does cheap paperbacks, tumescent with air-dried seawater and crunchy with sand, paragraph after paragraph of poorly written pulp meant to be read as fast as the passing of summer itself.

By MIKE MILIARD | June 17, 2009

It's not simple

Talking stories, sex, and children with author Diana Joseph
Diana Joseph's new essay collection I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: The Astonishing True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother and Friend to Man and Dog begins with an account of her father giving her the sex talk: "When a girl goes with this one, and then that one, and then that one over there ... what happens is people will start to talk.

By EMILY PARKHURST | June 03, 2009

Owning her identity

Portland zinester's tales become a book
After twice seeing the one-woman stage adaptation of The Passion of the Hausfrau at Portland Stage Company, and perusing several issues of the Hausfrau mutha-zine , I was curious to see how Nicole Chaison's tales of motherhood would translate to book form.

By DEIRDRE FULTON | June 03, 2009

Keeping faith

Piers Paul Read looks inside the Church
His publicist calls Piers Paul Read "the anti-Dan Brown." She's capitalizing on a buzz - worthy name, sure, but it's a fairly insightful description of a man whose latest book, The Death of a Pope , explores not the Brownish theme of the Catholic Church secretly at work in world affairs, but rather its inverse.

By JEFF INGLIS | June 03, 2009

Full shelf

The best in summer reading
Hot town, summer in the city. . . . or in the country. . . . or at the beach. Wherever you are, don't forget your books.

By BARBARA HOFFERT | June 08, 2009

River song

A lyrical turn in the South
Tim Gautreaux writes of a South that never changes. Dense, humid, with a fecundity that is more than a match for any human development, his South is largely a no man's land where the trees close off the sky, their roots rise "from the soppy mud like stalagmites," and the calm is broken only by the "stout windings of water moccasins."

By CLEA SIMON | May 13, 2009

Smooth lyricism

Betsy Sholl's Rough Cradle rocks
In "The Sea Itself," Betsy Sholl writes of a No said to the storm tide: "...such a total No , it became a kind of Yes ,/so the world was suddenly everything at once,/solid and shifty, stormy and calm."

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 06, 2009

Creative play

Words and Images 2009 is less serious, but headier, than in the past
It has now been 40 years since the University of Southern Maine began publication of its literary and arts journal Words and Images .

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 06, 2009

Bad girls

Mary Gaitskill carries on
People tend to make much of what they think of as Mary Gaitskill's fictional realm, a place of sexual transgression, of violence, violation, rape, and sado-masochism, and her female characters, the violated, the used, the users.

By DANA KLETTER | April 28, 2009

Brain strain

Jonah Lehrer on neurological warfare and picking a cereal
Those of us aching for a 300-page treatise about the crippling implications of the "build your own scramble" at Local 188 won't, at first glance, find a great deal of solace in Jonah Lehrer's second book, How We Decide.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | April 08, 2009

The price is right

Alexander C. Irvine sees a Buyout in your future
For a guy sometimes compared to Philip K. Dick, Alex Irvine took his time in getting around to writing about the future.

By SAM PFEIFLE | April 01, 2009

The shape of things

Portlander's stories explore the connections between what's inside and out
We are shaped by what surrounds us. Our exteriors — meaning geographical locations, physical infrastructure, and bodies alike — affect our interior states of mind.

By DEIRDRE FULTON | April 01, 2009

Review: The Rocket that Fell to Earth

Roger Clemens's fall and rise and fall
On July 18, 1992, in a celebrated post-game meltdown at the Metrodome in Minneapolis, the pitcher formerly known as the Rocket expressed his displeasure over a column I had written.

By GEORGE KIMBALL | April 01, 2009

Restoring a master

A new biography seeks to redefine Marc Chagall's place in art history
When Marc Chagall died in 1985 at the age of 98 he was internationally famous, wealthy, and had lived to see a museum built for him by the French government.

By KEN GREENLEAF | March 30, 2009

Everything is illuminated

Samantha Hunt weaves historical fiction from Nikola Tesla's biography
A solemn pigeon, a rolling thunderstorm, flecks of dust: nearly everything speaks in The Invention of Everything Else , Samantha Hunt's second novel.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | March 11, 2009

Review: The Kindly Ones

Inside the Reich
Those put off by the soft-pedaling of the SS in the movie adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader might be wary of Jonathan Littell's memoir of fictional war criminal Maximilien Aue.

By PETER KEOUGH | March 11, 2009

Interview: G. Xavier Robillard

Of politics, capes, and fame-whoring
There just aren't many career options for a washed-up superhero these days.

By MARY PHILLIPS-SANDY | February 18, 2009

Water Dogs

Lewis Robinson's first novel picks up where Officer Friendly left off
A sort-of mystery novel that may or may not involve a crime, Water Dogs is also the story of a family broken by the death of its patriarch, "Coach," whose three children (fail to) cope with his death in highly individualized and complicated ways.

By ALEX IRVINE | January 28, 2009

< prev 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | next >

Today's Event Picks

[MUSIC] Royal Hammer wraps residency at Port City Music Hall