Previewing Glide, Chris Richards' new-age DJ night at Cafe Saint-Ex, gave me a chance to make two points about the genre. First, you can argue that the music is a home-grown development, with roots in the guitar style John Fahey developed in Takoma Park. (For more on that, check out David Dunlap Jr.'s stellar [...]

What It Was, the 18th novel by D.C. crime novelist George Pelecanos, is priced to move. The trade paperback costs what a typical ebook does ($9.99), and the ebook is priced like one of the Funkadelic and Stylistics tunes that bubble under the plot: Ninety-nine cents if you buy it within a month of its Jan. [...]

Short-story collections have a way of getting, er, short shrift when top-10 season rolls around. In part that's because they have to meet an impossible standard: A novel is usually obligated to sustain only one tone and a handful of themes across its pages, while the short-story writer has to play with multiple tones and [...]

Every author who speaks at the National Book Festival enjoys an extra benefit onstage, one that doesn't come with the typical reading or appearance. No, on the National Mall, each author gets a straight man—somebody who has to stay poker-faced while the writer gets to crack wise. In this case, the straight men are the [...]

The organizers of the National Book Festival, now in its 11th year, know how to draw a crowd early. The fest has typically slated the biggest names for the opening slots, and on Saturday tents filled at 10 a.m. for PBS anchor/novelist Jim Lehrer, longtime Post columnist Eugene Robinson, and Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison, who [...]

This week the Library of Congress announced the names of many of the authors scheduled to appear at this year’s National Book Festival. As usual, it’s a high-wattage lineup that includes Jennifer Egan (whose A Visit From the Goon Squad has won a host of fiction awards in the past year), Toni Morrison, Dave Eggers, [...]

Anybody who’s cared about culture in the past decade has had reason to hope for more subsidies from billionaires. In 2002 pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly gave a surprise $100 million gift to the Poetry Foundation. The following year Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, died and left $200 million to NPR in her [...]

Peter Margasak at our sister paper the Chicago Reader brings the news that the Black Cat will be hosting a pre-Inauguration Day concert on Jan. 19. The Big Shoulders Ball, as the name suggests, is a Chicago-oriented event. It was coordinated by Tim Tuten, co-owner of a great Chicago venue, the Hideout, and the lineup [...]

There's lots of interesting info in an update posted Friday on Crooked Beat's MySpace page: Vinyl is now the big sales driver for the store, which is now dialing back the new CDs it stocks and getting more selective with its used CD selection as well. Excerpts from the post below. (But go read the [...]

If the New York Times figures it's worth having Bill Kristol to have angry blog commenters kick around, then it only makes sense for the Washington Times to publish an Obama supporter every once in a while. Last week marked the debut of a column by country singer-songwriter (and former local) Mary Chapin Carpenter, who [...]