Say you buy something in a shop in Jakarta. Under the unseen but watchful presence of the proprietor, the salesgirl who assisted you gives your purchase to the cashier, who rings it up and gives you two or three receipts, and perhaps a coupon or some other printed matter. Someone else wraps, bags and double-tapes […]
Adam Sobsey
Bio: Adam Sobsey (@sobsey) writes about wine and culture for INDY Week.Twitter: http://twitter.com/sobsey
Posted inArt
Geraldine Brooks’ thrilling yarn of biblical scholarship
People of the Book By Geraldine Brooks Viking, 372 pp. “Katrina Helps Spread Cajun Cooking,” touted a recent Yahoo! News headline. The article reported on displaced cooks opening Louisiana-style restaurants far from home. Even some rural West Virginians now know a muffuletta from a muffin. Disaster is good for a diaspora. Multiculturalism tends to proliferate […]
Posted inArt
The Dukes of Durham
A Rush to Injustice by Nader Baydoun and R. Stephanie Good Thomas Nelson, 260 pp. Durham: A Self-Portrait by Steve Channing Video Dialog, Inc. It’s Not About the Truth by Don Yaeger, with Mike Pressler Threshold Editions, 321 pp. Until Proven Innocent by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s […]
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Two holiday novellas from Michael Knight
The Holiday Season By Michael Knight Grove Press, 195 pp. Michael Knight’s slim volume The Holiday Season might make a good stocking stuffer for family members in need of escape and commiseration after the shrapnel of present-opening has settled, the eggnog has curdled and cabin fever has set in. Although it is well known that […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Fashion plates
Ask most cooks about their attiresome variation on a white chef’s coat, baggy pants, comfortable footwear and a “hair restrainer”and they shrug and say something like, “That’s just what we wear” or “That’s what I got in cooking school.” Why such resignation, even though the coat is, as Piedmont co-owner Andy Magowan says, “the most […]
Posted inNews
Jeanne M. Leiby’s Downriver
One thing Downriver, the debut short story collection by Jeanne M. Leiby, will certainly not make you want to do is to move south of Detroit, the setting of most of her stories. Polluted working-class neighborhoods wedge themselves between abandoned factories, and the bar is hard by the sewage plantor “the shit factory,” as one […]
Posted inNews
Marc Jampole
The particulars of 57-year-old Marc Jampole and his first book of poetry are elusive. His 89-page Music from Words is the only title listed in the catalog of Bellday Books, whose Web site explains: “Founded in North Carolina, Bellday Books is a small press that specializes in publishing the finest in contemporary American experimental poetry.” […]
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Andrea Barrett’s The Air We Breathe
The Air We Breathe By Andrea Barrett W. W. Norton, 297 pp. The key word in the title of Andrea Barrett’s new novel, The Air We Breathe, is neither the subject or verb but the pronoun “we”: The book is very deliberately written in the collective voice. Its last sentence is “Thisthis!is what we did.” […]
Posted inNews
Jonathan Messinger’s Hiding Out
If there is a place to put writing, Jonathan Messinger will probably find it. The credits page of his new short story collection, Hiding Out, includes a 50-word story”It Feels As Though It Ran a Little Long, Maybe by 5 Words.” The about-the-author section offers another one. And the full catalog listing for Hiding Out, […]
Posted inArt
Brock Clarke’s burning ambition
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England By Brock Clarke Algonquin Books, 303 pp. Do you think American literary classics like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward are in fact “more than a little boring”? Trying to choose between two doors or paths, have you stopped to complain that Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” only […]