Reading Jonah Weiner’s Creed encomium yesterday reminded me that when “Higher” hit the airwaves in 1999 as the first single from Creed’s Human Clay, I knew on first listen that I had to learn that song.

Read More “Creed Was Never Underrated” »

In which the author briefly discusses five new books he’d read, if time permitted.

1. The Wild Things (Fur-Covered Edition), by Dave Eggers.

Another in adventure in meta by postmodernist Dave Eggers, this novelization of high modernist Maurice Sendak’s ubiquitous children’s book is also based on a screenplay for the recent film that Eggers wrote with postmodernist Spike Jonze. I’d read this because I like things that are meta, and because I like things that are covered in fur.

2. The Best American Essays 2009, edited by Mary Oliver.
I often buy, but rarely read, books in the “The Best” series published every year. (”The Best American Short Stories,” “The Best American Science and Nature Writing,” “The Best American Sports Writing,” etc.) I’m never sure what’s in them, but they look good on the bookshelf, and make me feel intelligent which, really, is what books are for.

3. Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem.
Jonathan Lethem’s written a bunch of books I’ve never read, but I always see in people’s apartments in Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Green Point. Though I’m not interested in the Brooklyn Renaissance (can we call the decade-long Brooklyn cultural explosion a Renaissance yet?), I am interested in alliteration, and boy, is this book’s title alliterated (alliterative? alliteral?).

4. War Dances, by Sherman Alexie.
Sherman Alexie is responsible for one bad movie, but publishes good, emo stories in the New Yorker and is Native American and, though it’s not politically correct to say or think so, Native Americans are cool.

5. American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, by Craig Ferguson.
Aren’t you at least a little curious to read about this talk show host/former Drew Carey Show star’s alcoholism and suicide attempt? He’s one of those guys who seems like a douchebag, but, if he really is a douchebag, is probably a cool douchebag.

On his most recent visit to Busboys and Poets, George Pelecanos wasn’t just selling his own books—he was also hawking a slim New York Review of Books reissue of a 1966 novel whose out-of-focus Ken Light cover photo (above right) exemplifies the undeserved obscurity of its author: Don Carpenter (below right). The novel in question is Carpenter’s debut, Hard Rain Falling. In his introduction, Pelecanos says the book “sent me back to my desk, jacked up on ambition.”

Readers of a less writerly bent will likely experience a similar “jacking up”: Carpenter’s terse, overtly masculine prose, precise vernacular, and above all the unsentimental yearners who populate his book constitute a plausible, troubling world—one from which it’s hard to emerge without a bit of a head rush. The novel follows Jack Levitt, an orphan who bounces around the Pacific Northwest—between an orphanage, pool halls, reform school, dank hotels, and prisons—before marrying and siring an heir in San Francisco. It’s a volume fairly dripping with testosterone—the women get a fair shake, sure, but exclusively through the eyes of the men who sympathize, or try to; not for nothing is the book’s most intense relationship between Jack and Billy Lancing, a light-skinned black pool prodigy from Seattle who rematerializes next to Jack in San Quentin.

Read More “Exhuming Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling:
An interview with Edwin Frank” »