Critical Reviews
Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World’s Deadliest Jobs—Andy and Johnathan Hillstrand, with Malcolm MacPherson
There is one true thing about fishermen: if you have either the luck or misfortune to be within earshot of one, you know you are going to be in for a story. At least half of it could be bullshit, but it won’t matter. The story is the point—not the…
New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City—Andrei Codrescu
In 1947 Louis Armstrong posited the musical question, “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?” Sixty years later, this chestnut has taken on a whole new meaning, and (if you have any kind of heart at all) has a tendency to stick in the throat. This collection…
When You Are Engulfed in Flames—David Sedaris
Reading David Sedaris while eating has made me almost choke to death several times. You’d think I would have learned—once it’s time to move masticated yet still relatively solid matter into my throat, the same pipe I use to gather air so I don’t die—put down the funny book. Whether…
Put on This Record: Then Came The Last Days of May—Blue Öyster Cult [1972]
Every year at this time, I have to pull out the old Blue Öyster Cult records and celebrate. Then Came The Last Days of May is the easily the most haunting song on probably the eeriest rock album ever made. BÖC’s portrayal of a true-life trio of young men who…
Angel Down—Daniel Kraus
I was not emotionally prepared for Daniel Kraus’ 2025 book, Angel Down. I can’t remember what drove me to pick it up in the first place, although it lives firmly within my wheelhouse. Man’s inhumanity to man? Check. The utter indifference of heaven? Check. Biblical allusions that don’t turn out…
Put on This Record: hyphenated-man—Mike Watt & the Missingmen [2010]
To be familiar with punk rock veteran Mike Watt is to know and appreciate his idiosyncrasies, moreover, to have learned to expect him to make those left turns that light out for the territories and sometimes veer into the weeds. The thing about left turns, however, is if you make…
The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future—Stephen March
It has only been three years since Canadian writer Stephen March took a hard look at his country’s downstairs neighbor and found us… well, let’s just say that we aren’t going to get our deposit back. Like a tenant that has decided to start cooking meth in the kitchen at…
Put on This Record: The Wörld is Yours—Motörhead [2010]
There are three things in life you can be sure of: death, taxes, and Motörhead. When this album dropped, it felt like the Devil’s favorite band was everywhere. A documentary, Lemmy: 49% Motherf**ker, 51% Son Of A Bitch, was burning cigarette holes in the screen, and this punishing new album…
Daytripper—Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá
Originally published as a 10-issue series, this compilation makes up one of the most imaginative, and ultimately moving, graphic novels I’ve yet encountered. The Brazilian twin bothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá have delivered a truly heartfelt story that transcends the comic book genre, while taking advantage of the graphic…
The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings—Lew Welch
Scanning the used books over at the wonderful Book Passage in Corte Madera, I came across several faded paperbacks by Beat writer Lew Welch. One of the lesser-known Beats, Welch is probably best known as the other hopeless drunk in Jack Kerouac’s majestically depressing Big Sur. Flipping through his work,…
The Day I First Believed—Wally Lamb
Former Oprah Book Club golden boy Wally Lamb took his time writing his third novel, The Day I First Believed, a harrowing look at violence and the effect it has on those caught in its collateral snare. Lamb’s much anticipated follow-up to 1998’s I Know This Much is True is…
Superworse—Ben Greenman
If there is one thing you could say about this slowly aging, psychedelically dented, slightly cynical romantic, it’s that I likes me some metafiction. When Dave Eggers and his crew started up McSweeney’s back in ’98, I thought I had died and gone to a well-lighted, non-denominational heaven (which for…
Put on This Record: Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl—Van Morrison [2009]
On the list of things I never thought I’d see (or hear), Van Morrison revisiting his seminal 1968 album, Astral Weeks, has lived at the top of the leaderboard for more years than I’d care to count. Over the years, the Man has developed a thick-skinned persona that holds stardom…
Gun, with Occasional Music—Jonathan Lethem
One of my favorite things about Jonathan Lethem’s work is the sense of fun he imparts when playing with the expectations of genre. His first novel, Gun with Occasional Music, takes the noir of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and fuses it with the dystopian science fiction of Philip K.…
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster—Richard Brautigan
I was a huge Richard Brautigan fan in my early 20s and I spent many rainy days haunting the used bookstores of the Pacific Northwest looking for any of his books I might of missed. Come to think of it, I still can’t imagine a better way to spend a…
What He’s Poised to Do: Stories—Ben Greenman
Ben Greenman’s wistful collection of short stories, What He’s Poised to Do, begins at a remove. For a book that both posits and ponders the importance of interpersonal communication, Greenman chooses to keep readers at arm’s length—at least until he’s gotten to know you better. His use of characters identified…
The Time Machine Did It—John Swartzwelder
After receiving this slim volume as a gift, I devoured it in one day—laughing my butt off throughout. As the cover so discreetly points out (this fact and the title are the only elements on the front of the book), Swartzwelder is better known as the author of 59 episodes…
Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch & the Beat Generation—Aram Saroyan
At the behest of poet Ted Berrigan, a young Aram Saroyan interviewed a becalmed and nearly forgotten Jack Kerouac in 1967 for the Paris Review. Saroyan describes this meeting much later in an article for The Poetry Foundation. It is a watershed moment, one generation testing the next, and Saroyan…
Put on This Record: Funland—Unknown Instructors [2009]
Shakespeare had it right. You really can’t trust anyone that doesn’t appreciate music. All of our greatest thinkers eventually seem to come to the conclusion that we are only vibrations in the great void. Call it the Big Bang Theory, call it what you will, but how could one go…
Put on This Record: Blows Against the Empire—Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship [1970]
Credited to Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship before there was such a thing, Blows Against the Empire remains one of my all-time favorite albums, the centerpiece to the Planet Earth Rock ’n’ Roll Orchestra (PERRO) experience, itself a loose (very loose) confederation of Bay Area musicians that cross-pollinated David Crosby’s…
Put on This Record: Another Side of Bob Dylan—Bob Dylan [1964]
I was 11 years old in 1977 and while punk was exploding elsewhere, I was in a backwater of the San Francisco Bay Area discovering Bob Dylan. My best friend’s dad was an ex-folkie with a guitar and a great collection of vinyl. Whereas my dad still loved and played…
Life—Keith Richards
Whether or not you will be captivated by Rolling Stones guitarist and all-around bon vivant Keith Richards’ autobiography all the way to the end of its 547 pages swings on a couple of factors. Number one: How much do you still like and care about the Rolling Stones? Number two:…
Always Something—Jim Dodge
I am always hoping that Jim Dodge will surprise us all and finally announce the novel he has long been threatening to finish; his most recent, Stone Junction, dropped in the far-distant reality of 1990. A collection of poetry, Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Prose,…
Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer—Chuck Thompson
Former Maxim features editor and all-around bon vivant Chuck Thompson peels back the faux-bamboo veneer of the travel business in a scathing, often hysterically funny, exposé. Thompson bemoans the lack of any kind of authentic point of view in contemporary travel writing while explaining precisely why such a voracious growth…
The Buzzing—Jim Knipfel
I don’t know if Jim Knipfel presaged the conspiracy-laden epoch we find now ourselves mired in, or perhaps somehow helped to manifest it—a conspiracy theory in its own right. In 2003’s The Buzzing, we are treated to the sensational spinout of newspaper reporter, Roscoe Baragon, once a globe-trotting newshound who…
Gentleman of the Road: A Tale of Adventure—Michael Chabon
Since he left the smoky environs of Pittsburg behind, transplanted Berkeley author Michael Chabon has evolved into quite a chameleon—trying out genres in the same way the rest of us might try on hats. His preceding novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, was all about the fedora. With Gentlemen of the…
Frank’s Bloody Books: A Novel—Mack Green
Mack Green’s second novel to mine what he learned in his two tours in Southeast Asia, Frank’s Bloody Books is one king hell bastard of a read. From the sudden violence from unexpected directions inherent in the war-torn jungle of Vietnam, to the… well, sudden violence from unexpected directions inherent…
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye—Jonathan Lethem
This collection of short stories from Berkeley-by-way-of-Brooklyn writer Jonathan Lethem explores the same sort of absurdist science fiction landscape as his novel Amnesia Moon. These seven pieces show the depth and breadth of Lethem’s creativity as he explores the outer reaches of genre. The stories that were previously printed in…
The Implacable Order of Things—Jose Luis Peixoto
I had been on a bit of a discovery voyage of Portuguese literature, riding waves of Saramago, Camões, and Pessoa, when I happened across José Luís Piexoto’s first novel, The Implacable Order of Things, which suddenly and effectively sank it. It’s not that Piexoto, a poetical author of great skill…
Memory Wall: Stories—Anthony Doerr
One of the elusive pleasures of reading is discovering an author that has somehow slipped through your own personal cracks, a writer that once found, seems to have been working just for you all along, you were just too busy or preoccupied to notice. The best part of finally finding…
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I think anyone who’s not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who’s a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can’t distance my own experience from what I’m doing.
—Chuck Klosterman
Román Leão 