Books and Publishing Stories

347 stories found. Showing page 1 of 18.

In Praise of Push: The movie adaptation of Sapphire's 1996 novel opens this Friday but, please, read the book

Books | 11/17/2009 | By Michael Corbin

As a teacher I never made anyone read Sapphire’s 1996 Push. I never promoted it. I just had it available in the classroom, lying around. It’s a book that would never be officially assigned, a book tha...[MORE]

Cool Hunting: Jazz writer Ted Gioia bites off more than he can chew

Books | 11/18/2009 | By Michaelangelo Matos

On page one of The Birth (and Death) of the Cool (Speck Press), jazz historian and corporate consultant Ted Gioia writes that the word cool has become "a verbal tic expressing approval of any sort ....[MORE]

Teen Slate: Natalie Standiford's new young-adult novel brings her back to Baltimore

Books | 11/4/2009 | By Lee Gardner

"When I was in college, one of the TAs of one of my writing seminars asked me, 'Why are all your stories about kids?'" Natalie Standiford recalls. At the time, she says, "I thought, Well, I'm 18, wha...[MORE]

Remembering Donald Goines

Arts and Minds | 10/22/2009 | By Bret McCabe

Thank you, BET, for reminding everybody that it was on this day that 1970s crime fiction lost one of its most immediate storytellers: Detroit's Donald Goines and his common-law wife were murdered 35 y...[MORE]

Total Conflicts of Interest: Pimping City Paper Alumni

Arts and Minds | 10/20/2009 | By Bret McCabe

Erstwhile City Paper contributor Violet Glaze becomes a full-fledged writer today, and not a mere ink-stained hack like the rest of us here in alt-weekly journalism. Her debut paranormal erotic e-book...[MORE]

The Tenth Annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference Takes the Bus

Arts and Minds | 10/9/2009 | By Chris Landers

The crowd at the 10th annual conference of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society that gathered in Baltimore Sept. 30-Oct. 3 was older, but not uniformly so, and perhaps a bit tweedy, but not entirely. The s...[MORE]

Every Story Paints a Picture: With the publication of The Elements, long-running Baltimore duo the Tinklers return to their spry narrative roots

Books | 10/7/2009 | By Bret McCabe

Consider: One morning Mary sees her husband Steven off to his first day at an aluminum beverage-container manufacturer. He returns looking broken, a shell of the man who left that morning. The next da...[MORE]

Q & A: Jessica Hopper: A conversation with the music writer, This American Life consultant and author of The Girls' Guide to Rocking

Books | 8/19/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

A music writer whose bylines have appeared everywhere from Spin to the Chicago Tribune, Renaissance woman Jessica Hopper is also a music consultant for This American Life and has logged serious ti...[MORE]

The Bong Goodbye: Thomas Pynchon skewers America's political history in his endlessly entertaining variation on the detective yarn

Arts and Entertainment | 8/19/2009 | By Bret McCabe

Let's get one thing nice and sparkling clear: Thomas Pynchon's new Inherent Vice (Penguin Press), his seventh novel, isn't the best work of his career. That honor goes to 1997's verbally ambitious...[MORE]

Yakety Yak: Songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller remember redefining postwar pop music

Books | 8/12/2009 | By Geoffrey Himes

Jerry Leiber once told me that joining the board of the Songwriter's Hall of Fame in 1985 was one of the highlights of his life. After years of being dismissed for writing rock 'n' roll hits for Elvis...[MORE]

I, the Jury: Former prosecutor and law professor Paul Butler advocates jury nullification in Let's Get Free

Books | 8/5/2009 | By Michael Corbin

When former federal prosecutor Paul Butler appeared on 60 Minutes in 1996 to explain his critique of America's criminal-justice system in The Yale Law Journal, he was introduced portentously by one ...[MORE]

Human Architecture: The protagonist isn't the only one obsessed with capturing life in two dimensions in Asterios Polyp

Books | 7/29/2009 | By Jess Harvell

The "literary graphic novel" has been both a boon and a bane to comics as an art form, given that so much of what's been produced under the banner rarely works as comics. A comic's narrative pleasure...[MORE]

Three Feet High and Rising: Expat Baltimore writer and ex-Last Picture Show lead man Louis Maistros weaves a luring tale from New Orleans

Books | 7/22/2009 | By Joab Jackson

Wander down the commercial district of Bourbon Street in New Orleans early any morning, and you may be amazed by how cleanly scrubbed the sidewalks are. You'd assume otherwise, given the influx of r...[MORE]

Mr. Independent Press: American Radical gives consummate muckraker I.F. Stone his proper respects

Books | 7/16/2009 | By Edward Ericson Jr.

In the 1970s and ’80s I.F. Stone became a famous journalist and a patron saint of investigative reporters. He was a touchstone to students of the craft—such as this writer, who first heard the n...[MORE]

Small Change: The more Tom Waits creates "Tom Waits," the less fans--or biographers--know about him

Books | 7/1/2009 | By Van Smith

A year before Barney Hoskyns' Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits (Broadway) hit bookstores in May, "Tom Waits True Confessions" was published online by Waits' record label, Anti (anti.com). Po...[MORE]

Zipper Rippers: Women write gay male romance novels for women

Books | 6/17/2009 | By Heather Harris

The romance novel, a static and predictable genre, is undergoing an evolution of sorts: storylines written by straight women for straight women . . . about gay men. Gay men are allowed to read them,...[MORE]

Reverend Jen

Books | 6/4/2009 | By Bret McCabe

Performance artist, writer, painter, poet, filmmaker, and general Lower East Side force of nature Reverend Jen has spent nearly 20 years cranking out a lovingly and welcomingly outlandish swath of cre...[MORE]

Fang Fiction: What happens when a vampire novel becomes something else--or, pardon me, but your teeth are in my apocalyptic nightmare

Books | 6/3/2009 | By Bret McCabe

With a man of science as its renegade bad ass, a Treblinka subplot, and a Bushwick-based Russian exterminator named Vasiliy Fet going for it, Mexican writer/director Guillermo del Toro and crime-f...[MORE]

Redefining Black?: Essay collection explores the meanings of "African" and "American" in "African-American"

Books | 5/13/2009 | By Makkada B. Selah

African-Americans have been called many things: slaves, colored, black. There's always been a contingent of them eager to reclaim their Africanness, though, because they never felt completely acce...[MORE]

The Un-Career Woman: Ruth Reichl's mother takes center stage again--this time on her own terms.

Books | 4/29/2009 | By Michaelangelo Matos

The three memoirs by Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl--1998's Tender at the Bone, 2001's Comfort Me with Apples, and 2005's Garlic and Sapphires--have a generational cast to them. The particula...[MORE]