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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

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

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

K is for clown

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

By CLIF GARBODEN | June 30, 2009

Newman's own

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

Hooked

Michael Stein Examines The Addict
Providence author and physician Michael Stein has an uncanny ability to make a medical case history read like a novel in his newest book, The Addict (William Morrow, 288 pages, $26). It's not only that he makes us care about the patients whose lives he describes; it's also that he puts himself into the narrative.

By JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | June 16, 2009