Arts >>

Books

Winners and sinners

Barth, Bolaño, Roth, Morrison, and more
Ah, fall, when Nobel Prize winners are announced — and, now, when past winners turn up with more good reading.

By BARBARA HOFFERT | September 11, 2008

War correspondent

Paul Auster sheds light on Man in the Dark
So here he goes again, the writer known as Paul Auster, starting yet another novel, this time with the words “I am alone in the dark.”

By PETER KEOUGH | September 02, 2008

Out of this world

Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King
The worlds Rosenbaum creates feel less like a separate or “alternate” reality and more like a colorful, if complicated, extension of the one we know.

By NINA MACLAUGHLIN | August 26, 2008

War stories

Mailer on the ’68 conventions
“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago , you can’t help but feel a chill.

By CHARLES TAYLOR | August 19, 2008

William Walsh’s work spans from the porn business to Calvin Trillin
William Walsh first wrote Without Wax: A Documentary Novel as a short story about a young man caught up in the world of triple-X adult films.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 05, 2008

Car talk

A close look at driving
For days post-late-merge, Vanderbilt had feelings of guilt and confusion.

By AMY FINCH | August 04, 2008

Victim, not vixen

Sex, death, and the filthy rich
Florence Evelyn Nesbit was the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

By CLIF GARBODEN | July 29, 2008

Tricky Dick

Philip K. Dick's second Library of America volume
The Philip K. Dick phenomenon might be petering out.

By PETER KEOUGH | July 28, 2008

Islander

Julie Hecht’s self-help
There’s still time to spend some of your summer with Julie Hecht.

By JON GARELICK | July 22, 2008

Local colors

Mysterious doings in Providence
Two and a half years after publication of the well-received debut novel, Carom Shot , fans of the Providence-set mystery novel are finally seeing a series get underway.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | July 16, 2008

Bookman

Larry McMurtry’s life in the trade
Larry McMurtry, the best I can tell, remains the only man to have both won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and written an Academy Award–winning screenplay.

By GEORGE KIMBALL | July 08, 2008

Master builders

Books on, and by, architects
A good architectural monograph is more than just a big colorful book with too-good-to-be-true photos; it’s a window into the heart and mind of the architect it profiles.

By DAVID EISEN | June 24, 2008

Mike Edison walks alone

Funhouse
On his death bed, Mike Edison probably won’t lament that he didn’t do this or he didn’t go there.

By AMY FINCH | June 10, 2008

Spirited

Rory Raven's Haunted Providence
Rory Raven’s Haunted Providence is a must-read for anyone who likes to collect every stray fact of local history or hopes to frighten campers around midnight campfires this summer.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 19, 2008

Fever dreams

Fear and loathing in Desemboque
Written in the tradition of the historieta — pulp comics sold in the tens of millions monthly from every Mexican newsstand and bodega — Dead in Desemboque comes across like a dying gringo’s border desert mirage.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 19, 2008

Animal house

Sara Gruen’s fictional menagerie
Each of Sara Gruen’s first three novels have had animal characters who were crucial to the book, but Water for Elephants has made the biggest splash.

By JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | April 30, 2008

Life lines

Michael Morse’s Rescuing Providence
When Michael Morse was a boy in the 1970s, the TV show Emergency was his favorite, and when playing war he always wanted to be the medic.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | March 19, 2008

Western ways

Thomas Cobb’s long road to Shavetail
The frontier West. That setting is as perilous as the human condition itself, the stark landscape a visual parable.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | February 20, 2008

Show and tell

Adrian Tomine gets it together
I’d never really had a crush on a drawing before. But when I began reading Adrian Tomine several years ago, I started falling for ’em left and right.

By MIKE MILIARD | February 26, 2008

Exhibitionist

A collection of fabulous imaginings
Alex Rose plunges readers down little three- or four-page rabbit holes, so we don’t know where reality leaves off and fantasy begins.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | January 08, 2008

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

Today's Event Picks

[MUSIC] Hot Tuna at the Narrows Center for the Arts