I’m a terribly uncool person these days. I live in a small, somewhat hip college town in Northern California where any number of interesting cultural events are taking place on any given night, but I prefer to stay in and fart around online or watch bad TV. I drink corporate lattes because their place is more conveniently located than any of the ( Read more... )

Kaya Oakes resides in my pantheon of literary alterna-goddesses. She is an award-winning poet (Telegraph), author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture and teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the co-founder and senior editor of Kitchen Sink magazine ---a wickedly hip publication that ran from 2002 ( Read more... )

"I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," my mom said to me about a year ago on the phone. We were having one of our weekly phone calls. My mom was on one extension and my dad on the other, in their home in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The three of us discussed the books we were reading, the films we had recently seen and the revelations and ( Read more... )

Yesterday I finished reading Cheryl Strayed's memoir, Wild. She hiked the Pacific Crest Trail by herself when she was twenty-six years-old, reeling with grief from her mother's untimely death by cancer. I began reading this book six days after my mother found out that her breast cancer has recurred, this time in the bone of her mid humeral shaft.


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On the prowl for good short stories. Started with The Best American Short Stories 2011 edited by Geraldine Brooks, lost interest after reading the first two stories.....I was reading it on Kindle and got pissed off at the typos in the Kindle version. I became convinced that some pages were out of order in one of the stories so I went to Barnes & ( Read more... )

A wondrous thing occurred in 2002. It was the publication of a book written by Jonathan Safran Foer called, Everything is Illuminated. This luminous thing dwelt on my bookshelf for many years until one of you mentioned it a few days ago, prompting me to pull it from my shelf and now, NOW a powerful example of how imagination is more important than ( Read more... )

My American ADD-induced non-reading spell has finally been broken by the hilarious writing of Beth Lisick in her 2005 NY Times best-selling book of autobiographical sketches Everybody Into the Pool.

WHY DIDN'T YOU GUYS TELL ME ABOUT HER SOONER! DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING AROUND HERE?


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Dear Cormac McCarthy,

If you want me to read your National Book Award-winning trilogy that begins with All the Pretty Horses, then in the beginning, when you are introducing your characters to your readers, do not make it so freaking difficult to figure out who is telling the damn story. Because, look, when you introduce new characters, and don't ( Read more... )

We must all hail Mary Karr!

I'm serious. I recently read her memoir, The Liars' Club and hot damn, something good has come out of Texas after all ( Read more... )

I just finished reading Sherman Alexie's Flight, which, by the way, I don't think can be classified as magical realism. Flight's language is simple and the story is compelling. It addresses some of my favorite themes: identity, shame, betrayal, justice, revenge and redemption. This book would be an excellent read for high schoolers and I hope ( Read more... )