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Tapperina's tales

Jane Goldberg hoofs her way through
The frontispiece of Shoot Me While I'm Happy reproduces a poster for a New York Tap Fringe Festival performance in 2005.

By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL | August 13, 2009

Keep your eye on this Bird
Laura Jacobs, who was the dance critic here at the Phoenix in the mid 1980s, is the author of Landscape with Moving Figures, a collection of writing from the New Criterion that's as polemic as it is poetic. But she's also a novelist. Like Women About Town (2002), The Bird Catcher focuses on a young woman finding her way in 21st-century Manhattan.

By: JEFFREY GANTZ | August 05, 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 | October 04, 2010

Interview: Michael Lang

Going back to Woodstock
"At the end, he talks about how wonderful it was, but throughout the entire day, Pete Townshend was like the Grinch that stole Christmas. He was uptight, miserable, hated being there, and wanted to go home."

By: ROB TURBOVSKY | July 22, 2009

Wyndham's war

Revisiting a modest master
Francis Wyndham's first book of short stories, Out of the War , was published in 1974, when the author was 50 and in the midst of a distinguished career of reviewing and editing.

By: CHARLES TAYLOR | July 21, 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

. . . And so is your mom

If you don't have anything nice to say dept.
Va te faire enculer . Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Actually, I just told you to fuck off. Pardon my French!

By: CAITLIN E. CURRAN | August 08, 2011

K is for clown

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

By: CLIF GARBODEN | June 30, 2009

Interview: Aerosmith's Joey Kramer

The Aerosmith drummer steps out from behind the kit to talk about his new book, Hit Hard .
The hard-living lifestyles of Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry are well chronicled: the booze, the drugs, the long, flowing caftans.

By: THE SANDBOX | June 24, 2009

Aerosmith's Kramer put the 'Line' in 'Brookline'

In this book excerpt, Kramer recalls his life in greater Boston before the boys hit it big
All I know is that it's a fucking miracle that none of the five of us are dead.

By: JOEY KRAMER | June 24, 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

Interview: P.J. O'Rourke

Taking a spin: Driving like Crazy is travel writing in the classic tradition of Robert Byron.
"Bringing government in to run the car companies is like saying, 'Dad burned dinner, let's get the dog to cook.' "

By: PETER KADZIS | June 17, 2009

Plain spoken

Colm Tóibín's see-through prose
In American prose, there is a plain style, a child of the 20th century, descending from Hemingway and Cather. The best New Yorker writers — James Thurber, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcolm — have it.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | June 16, 2009

Undercover

April Smith's mystery/thrillers delve in darkness
Ana Grey is the fearless heroine of April Smith's dark and thoughtful thriller series. But reading these fast-paced books shows the question to be more complicated. Ana Grey is, after all, not only a brave FBI agent, but also the cowering daughter of a racist bully.

By: CLEA SIMON | June 09, 2009

Hard times

A former junkie looks back at tough days in Lowell
"You just shit yourself — every muscle, every joint aches. Your entire body cries for heroin. Just one bag of heroin, you know that's all you need, and you'll feel better."

By: MIKE MILIARD | June 08, 2009

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