All I can say to those I meet: "Try and make it to Cold Mountain.”   posted May 15, 2013 at 10:40AM

Footnotes to a non-existent text, Vila-Matas surveys the legacy and motivations of the dysgraphically inclined. An entertaining stroll through the invisible lexicon of the never written and the literary progenitors of the No including Arthur Rimbaud, Salinger, and Melville’s namesake Bartleby.   posted May 15, 2013 at 10:25AM

Super-Cannes is the ultra cutting-edge workplace of the future, with just one problem: the lifestyle makes you insane. But science is clever, proposing the simple solution of embracing your inner psychopath. Legions of wealthy employees venting their psychopathic frustrations are great for the corporate profit margin, terrible for all the rest of the ordinary people of the world. Sound familiar?   posted May 3, 2013 at 3:57PM

The characters in these short stories could have easily stepped out of Miranda July’s film Me and You and Everyone We Know. They are alienated, isolated, withdrawn, and yearn to break through spectacularly or maybe just go back to sleep. A breathtaking roller-coaster of inner workings and outer manifestations of our most contemporary longings.   posted May 3, 2013 at 10:16AM

A classic Bildungsroman on the one hand, also a superhero fantasy and a meditation on race and class and art... I tend to agree with Booklist that "this often-excellent novel labors under the weight of its ambition." Lethem, not to be denied, troubles the sensibilities of the reader in a way that the subtle lessons of this novel are still percolating through my psyche and will be for a long time.   posted Apr 25, 2013 at 2:01PM

The iconic postmodern sci-fi novel gets an exceptional audio treatment. Nice narration with fun voices for each of the characters evokes the various time-shifts and confusions they experience.   posted Apr 24, 2013 at 10:43AM

So much pain and humor, hope and loss, this is why we love Sherman Alexie. If you’ve seen the film Smoke Signals, you will recognize aspects of the characters Thomas Builds-The-Fire and Victor Joseph among others. And if you’ve ever been in a rock band or loved the music of Robert Johnson this one will grab your heart.   posted Apr 22, 2013 at 6:56PM

Incisively traces the history of the belief that, through a hard-won visionary acuity, the author CAN change the world!   posted Apr 10, 2013 at 1:51PM

The secret of invisibility? A universal language? A manuscript, a bunker, a hermit in the Egyptian desert... esoteric practice and the enigmatic Dr. Ragab, a teacher from another time. In the contemporary world, they can still create fantastic and unpredictable results!   posted Apr 9, 2013 at 1:35PM

Subverting meaning and identity with a gleeful and harrowing disregard for literary convention, I think of Acker as a kind of female William S. Burroughs come of age in the 1970s. A kind of deadly antidote to the literary-industrial complex, and so much more...   posted Apr 8, 2013 at 8:01PM