What became of Generation X? Don’t remember? You must be one of them. You grew up with Reaganomics and The Day After and MTV and AIDS. You’re addicted to video games, pop culture and irony. Terrified of sex and relationships. Insulated from politics by a batting of cynicism. Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan was a staple of […]
Adam Sobsey
Bio: Adam Sobsey (@sobsey) writes about wine and culture for INDY Week.Twitter: http://twitter.com/sobsey
Posted inArt
The final, unfinished novel of the late, great Larry Brown
A Miracle of Catfish By Larry Brown Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 456 pp. Was Larry Brown putting us on? An eyebrow lifts at “Aw, I’m just a common man who was real lucky to find out what I wanted to do with my life.” That throwaway interview comment wasn’t false modesty, but it wasn’t […]
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Minority leagues
Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the American South by Bruce Adelson University of Virginia Press, 275 pp. “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Jacques Barzun, 1954 Fans of the Durham Bulls would probably rather forget 2006. Not only did the team limp […]
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Randy F. Nelson’s The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men
The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men by Randy F. Nelson University of Georgia Press, 210 pp. “None of this story makes sense when you tell it straight,” disclaims the narrator of “Refiner’s Fire,” one of the stories in The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men. Randy F. Nelson, the author and Davidson College professor of English, […]
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Michael McFee’s The Napkin Manuscripts
The Napkin Manuscripts By Michael McFee University of Tennessee Press, 207 pp. Here’s a compliment North Carolina poet Michael McFee might very well reject: Over the course of a 30-year career, his poems have found the universal in the particular. That’s not exactly wrong, but you could give the same praise to most enduring art, […]
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Opiates of the masses
“If many remedies are prescribed for the same illness, you can be sure the illness has no cure.” Anton Chekhov I know a man in his mid-30screative, active, sociable and hardworkingwho not long ago got out of an emotionally stressful, financially draining, crisis-filled relationship and moved to a country house. For the next two months […]
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Michael Parker’s tales of the desperate and distraught
Don’t Make Me Stop Now by Michael Parker Algonquin Books, 276 pp. “After he left her” and “After she left”those are the opening words to two of the stories in Don’t Make Me Stop Now, the new collection by Greensboro’s Michael Parker. The repetition is no coincidence: Parker’s protagonists may be running, drinking, stealing, starving […]
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Pernice Brothers
Pernice Brothers Local 506, Chapel Hill with Elvis Perkins Tuesday, Dec. 5, 9:15 p.m. Tickets: $10 “Grudge F***,” a hungover piano ballad to a lost girlfriend, was an instant classic on the Scud Mountain Boys’ 1996 album Massachusetts. Bleak, quiet and bitterly funny, Massachusetts was an alt-country masterpiece. The songs seeped into the brain and […]
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Nasty old stuff: Suzanne Berne’s The Ghost at the Table serves painful memories with the turkey
The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne Algonquin Books, 292 pp. The holidays: that time of year when the children return, like migrant birds, to warmly lit homes, lavish meals, gift-giving. For some families, it is the only gathering of the year, an annual rite of heritage and replenishment. Or do your relatives drive […]