Friday, May 6 2011
The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes
Despite or even because of its jumble of missing pieces, half-finished recordings, garbled chronologies of composition or performance -- the basement tapes can begin to sound like a map; but if they are a map, what country, what lost mine, is it that they center and fix?
Tuesday, May 3 2011
20 Questions: David Thorne
Humorist and Satirist David Thorne’s book, The Internet is a Playground, published in April. Finally, he gets his biggest break, his surefire launch to celebritydom, here on PopMatters 20 Questions. (The royalty check is in the mail, David.)
Tuesday, April 26 2011
20 Questions: Meg Wolitzer
Bestselling author Meg Woliter's The Uncoupling, a humorous novel about female desire, publishes this month. Wolitzer taks with PopMatters 20 Questions about, among other things, the simple pleasures of having one's own man shirt.
Friday, April 22 2011
Excerpt from ‘A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS’
Julia and Paul Child were on the front lines of the Cold War in Europe, though Julia could not help feeling that the chill in the air had its origin in the “rampant right wingery” that had seized their own country… Washington was awash in paranoia and suspicion.
Wednesday, April 20 2011
The Ferocious Morality of David Foster Wallace
Any relationship with Wallace is destined for generosity, spirituality, and given the honesty and vulnerability of the writer, intimacy. It’s also going to be a serious challenge. It will challenge the reader’s intellect, ideology, and most of all, conception of morality.
Tuesday, April 19 2011
‘Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling’
“We thought sampling was just a way of arranging sounds,” says Chuck D… Public Enemy wanted “to blend sound. Just as visual artists take yellow and blue and come up with green, we wanted to be able to do that with sound.”
Monday, April 18 2011
From the Fringe of Islam: An Interview with Michael Muhammad Knight
Famous amongst orphaned Muslims -- teens and adults trying to find a place in a religion known for stringency -- Knight’s first book, The Taqwacores straddles the line between manifesto and coming of age novel.
Friday, April 8 2011
20 Questions: Jonathan Franklin
Award-winning investigative journalist and Hugh Laurie-kinda lookalike Jonathan Franklin has a knack for finding humor in the funniest places. Hugo Chavez as stand-up comedian we get. But Patrick Buchanan...?
Friday, April 1 2011
Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Queen
'Good on showmanship, but not sure about the singing,’ admitted Brian May, about the future Freddie Mercury. ‘Fred had a strange vibrato,’ chuckled Roger Taylor, ‘which some people found rather distressing.’
Friday, March 25 2011
‘The Art of Immersion’: From Frank Rose’s Book on How Digital Generation Is Changing Our World
Alternate reality games such as Why So Serious? are a new kind of interactive fiction, one that blurs the line between entertainment and advertising, as well as between fiction and reality, in ways barely imagined a decade earlier.
Tuesday, March 15 2011
20 Questions: Hal Needham
When they first light that match, hold your breath! If you inhale, you'll suck in the flames. We'd all be wiser to heed the advice of Hal Heedham, author of Stuntman! My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life (February 2011, Little, Brown & Company)
Tuesday, March 8 2011
20 Questions: David Anderegg
David Anderegg's 'Nerds: How Dorks, Dweebs, Techies, and Trekkies Can Save America' (Tarcher / Penguin, now in paperback) calls for embracing the socially awkward yet intellectually gifted among us.
Thursday, February 17 2011
Solarian Absurdity
In his classic SF novel Solaris, Stanislaw Lem composes an ode to the absurdity of the human struggle for knowledge. No better is this struggle encapsulated than in the infinite expanse of space and in the discovery of new worlds.
Wednesday, February 16 2011
20 Questions: Kim Edwards
'Labyrinth walker' and award winning author of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards talks with PopMatters 20 Questions about allowing oneself to head out into uncertain territory -- be it in the middle of a lake or the middle of a story -- and see where the journey takes you. Her latest, The Lake of Dreams published in January.
Wednesday, February 9 2011
Life, The Universe and Everything
Like Richard Feynman before him, Dr. Leonard Mlodinow has a gift that’s all too rare in physicists – he speaks Normal Person. The physicist and author of the New York Times best-seller The Drunkard’s Walk, Mlodinow has a knack for making the complicated issues that crop up in quantum physics understandable to everyday readers.
Monday, February 7 2011
20 Questions: Ariel Sabar
Before award winning author Ariel Sabar begins his book tour for Heart of the City this Valentine’s Day, he tells PopMatters 20 Questions about the lasting influence of an excellent newspaper editor he once knew.
Tuesday, January 25 2011
The Best Fiction of 2010
Tucked into this wide-ranging list of comics collections, retro-inspired literature and cross-overs, are glimmers of something sweet, something to temper the usual Literary Drearies we all love and appreciate. And that’s just the way it should be.
Monday, January 24 2011
The Best Non-Fiction of 2010
PopMatters' writers (a margin-friendly, iconoclastic bunch, for the most part) cast their nets far beyond the world of culture-production to capture some of the best non-fiction books published in 2010.
Friday, January 14 2011
Rescripting the Western in ‘No Country for Old Men’
How the Coen Brothers' ostensibly faithful award winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men diverges from its creator's rather questionable politics.
Wednesday, January 12 2011
Lost and Found in Russia: Lives in the Post-Soviet Landscape
This is the story of a nation going through a nervous breakdown, pulling through, but paying the price. It's about a people lost and found, about their search for meaning.