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Blues redux

The music’s other life
Demystifying the origins of the blues has become a cottage publishing industry.

By: TED DROZDOWSKI | February 12, 2008

Bishop, after all

The ‘poet’s poet’ gets canonized
To enter a Bishop poem with the mind and senses wide open is to be scrubbed back to first principles.

By: SVEN BIRKERTS | February 05, 2008

Pulp fiction

Russell Banks dips into the mainstream in The Reserve
The forbidding, remorseless Russell Banks has finally conceded to popular literature.

By: PETER KEOUGH | January 29, 2008

Shots in the dark

Joe Carducci recalls the real price of punk
Naomi Petersen was not famous. Neither was she semi-famous, almost famous, post-famous, or notorious.

By: JAMES PARKER | January 29, 2008

Shrink-wrapped

Carol Gilligan steps into fiction
If ever a thinker stood for the idea of questioning authority, it was Carol Gilligan.

By: CLEA SIMON | January 22, 2008

Sweet fallout

Philip Whalen’s word bombs
Philip Whalen (1923–2002) is a great American poet.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | January 14, 2008

Steve Martin’s new memoir unlocks the freaky logic of his comedy
Martin’s new memoir, Born Standing Up , grants us our best access yet to this remote and brilliant figure — the cool architect of the comedy.

By: JAMES PARKER | December 31, 2007

Tough thrill

Household justice
People who love this book tend to talk as if reading it were experiencing something terrible and necessary.

By: CHARLES TAYLOR | December 31, 2007

Free speech

Elizabeth Little’s word games
Twenty-six-year-old author (and Harvard grad) Elizabeth Little has had a lifelong love affair with language.

By: CLEA SIMON | December 31, 2007

Winter reads

Novels from Peter Carey and Russell Banks, poetry from Elizabeth Bishop, and advice from Madeleine Albright
Esteemed fiction writers, young stars, the Civil War, the ’60s, and the morass of contemporary geopolitics — it’s all here for reading during winter’s long, dark nights.

By: BARBARA HOFFERT | December 21, 2007

Sweet reads

Books: 2007 in review
Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry the Phoenix wrote about in 2007.

By: JON GARELICK | December 17, 2007

News to me

Robert Hass’s National Book Award
Notwithstanding the occasional university-press finalist (this year: David Kirby), the National Book Award for poetry is generally open to only a few American poets.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | December 11, 2007

Prison professor

A literary prize that really helps
There are lots of small presses. Dzanc Books, based near Detroit, is one of them, but it’s not like the rest.

By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN | December 05, 2007

Nerd noir

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ’s Black Dossier
This volume, the first published solely as a graphic novel, is the comic as fetish object.

By: CHARLES TAYLOR | December 03, 2007

Holiday books

Coffee-table madness
Okay, we admit, we went a bit crazy this year.

By: PHOENIX STAFF | December 03, 2007

Time with Tolstoy

The new translation of War and Peace
War and Peace is the epic to end all epics.

By: JEFFREY GANTZ | November 28, 2007

Scared green

Devra Davis’s cancer book
Even when we’re aware of some level of health risk involved in our mundane daily activities, we tend to ignore it.

By: DEIRDRE FULTON | November 27, 2007

Deep thinking

Peter Thomson’s cleansing journey
Lake Baikal fills a fracture in the surface of Siberia that’s 25 million years old, 395 miles long, and a mile deep.

By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN | November 19, 2007

Unforgettable

Oliver Sacks’s musical case files
In his New Yorker pieces over the years, Oliver Sacks has shown a talent for setting personal narratives against the increasingly mapped-out maze of human neurology.

By: AMY FINCH | November 19, 2007

Wrestle in peace

Remembering Mailer, the blustery king of American letters
In a life of many garlands and much renown, it was Mailer’s strange engagement with literary destiny always to be trapped on the wrong side of his art.

By: JAMES PARKER | November 14, 2007

Smartest girl

Diane Vadino’s secret nerd heart
Many people will pre-judge Betsy Nilssen — the heroine of Diane Vadino’s debut, Smart Girls Like Me — as another Bridget Jones or Andy Sachs, and that’s a shame.

By: SHARON STEEL | November 13, 2007

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