New Arrivals: Summer 2008
How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Deadby Ariel Gore
Despite the gimmicky nature of this title, Ariel Gore takes a tough love approach to developing your craft that dispenses with all of the usual trite suggestions. Comfort spaces and careful selection of your paper and pens are irrelevant to her DIY ethos. She points out the white elephant in teh room, asserting that nobody really cares how talented a writer you might be until you put in the leg work to get yourself published. With a few of the standard devices (just write, all the time) mixed into her gritty approach to guerrilla marketing, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead could possibly be one of the most useful tools an aspiring author could come across.
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Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbookby Isa Chanda Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero
Chefs MOskowitz and Romero present a delicious array of vegan cuisine without falling back on imitation meats or substitutions. Rather, they uphold the virtues of the vegetable in its own right, with a delectable collection of dishes from breakfast to dessert. Additionally, the first half of the book includes more generalized instructions on vegetable prep and vegan practices, to get you started with yoru own concoctions. Our cooking section has undergone a bit of a vegan renaissance just in time for the growing season. Come on in and check it out.
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The Plague of Doves
by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich's North Dakota has the hallucinogenic domesticity of Stanley Spencer's Cookham. In her 12 novels, she has returned again and again to the beloved and familiar landscape she grew up in, and the Native American reservation is lit up by her fevered imagination. This is a land where God and a liver-eating cannibal wrangle over the bodies of their prey and where young lovers melt into walls of doves.
The raucous and apocalyptic plague of birds of the title provides the background to Erdrich's bizarre and beautiful story. As the Catholics frighten away the doves with Hail Marys, the lovers Mooshum and Junesse come together in a meeting that later furnishes their granddaughter Evelina with proof that 'our family has maintained something of an historical reputation for deathless romantic encounters'.
This is a book that never lets us forget the sinewy, often tortuous rhythms of a culture that lives through words, passing on talismanic tales across the generations. At its heart is the dark story of the 1911 murder of a white family and the racist lynching of a group of Native American scapegoats, including Mooshum, whose escape from death troubles the consciences of his offspring. Erdrich weaves the politics of the encounter into a story that we come to understand layer by layer, with Evelina's own tale told in conjunction with the descendants of the lynchers and with the now elderly surviving baby of the murdered white family.
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Belong to Meby Marisa de los Santos
Everyone has secrets. Some we keep to protect ourselves, others we keep to protect those we love.
A devoted city dweller, Cornelia Brown surprised no one more than herself when she was gripped by the sudden, inescapable desire to leave urban life behind and head for an idyllic suburb. Though she knows she and her beloved husband, Teo, have made the right move, she approaches her new life with trepidation and struggles to forge friendships in her new home. Cornelia's mettle is quickly tested by judgmental neighbor Piper Truitt. Perfectly manicured, impeccably dressed, and possessing impossible standards, Piper is the embodiment of everything Cornelia feared she would find in suburbia. A saving grace soon appears in the form of Lake. Over a shared love of literature and old movies, Cornelia develops an instant bond with this warm yet elusive woman who has also recently arrived in town, ostensibly to send her perceptive and brilliant son, Dev, to a school for the gifted.
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Armageddon in Retrospectby Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Gris Grimly
A combination of Neil Gaiman's incredible imagination and Gris Grimly's wonderful illustrations makes this book a winner. Two children and their pet gazelle go adventuring in a boat, ('B is for Boat, pushing off in the dark'), and enter the frightening dark world of pirates and monsters.
Each letter of the alphabet pushes the children further into the sewers to face danger and fear ('F is for Fear and its many devices').
This is certainly not an alphabet for the small child but has been written for an older audience that likes to be thrilled by horror and mayhem. Grimly's illustrations are intricate and detailed and the reader will find much to pore over time and time again.
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Swayby Sandy Amazeen
Lazar takes three of the best known 60’s icons; the Stones, Charles Manson, Kenneth Anger and packages them into a story of the times which 20-somethings will likely fail to appreciate. Focusing on Brian Jones during the first years of the Stones success, Bobby Beausoliel who, under Manson’s influence, committed the first murder and the roles they played in Anger’s acclaimed avant-garde movie, Invocation of My Demon Brother this gritty rehash plunges the reader into the drug culture of the time. Mick Jagger who wrote the lyrics for Anger’s film and Keith Richards figure in as they struggle with the seductions of sudden popularity while honing their musical skills and feeling betrayed by Jones. Through it all, it is Anger’s story that binds the characters together against a backdrop of the Vietnam War and Manson family killings told with crystal clarity. Although Lazar's recreation of the 60's does an admirable job of capturing the feel of the time, this is likely to be lost on those who didn't live through that era.
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Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Criticby Jim DeRogatis
Bangs, who died in 1982 of what a New York medical examiner called a Darvon overdose (though some have other theories), casts a long shadow on rock & roll. He is arguably the only rock critic, dead or alive, whose life and achievements warrant a book-length examination. Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic by Chicago journalist Jim DeRogatis, is a warts-and-all look at this woefully self-destructive genius. The basic facts: Bangs, the product of a troubled home, grew up in El Cajon, CA, gravitating early to beat prose, jazz, and rock (not to mention drugs and alcohol). He was a shoe salesman when he began freelancing for Rolling Stone in 1969, but by 1971 he'd become the star staffer at Creem (''America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine''). He continued to write prolifically for numerous publications until his death. A wordsmith of uncommon eloquence and endless passion, he documented — and helped shape — both heavy metal and punk; his work (some of which can be found in the posthumous collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung) continues to inspire admirers and imitators.
As DeRogatis makes painfully clear, Bangs' personal life was a shambles. A world-class substance abuser, Bangs once called burning out ''the central heroic myth of the sixties,'' coining a credo — ''live fast, be bad, get messy, die young'' — and fulfilling it. The final chapters of Blurt, which document his free fall into an alcoholic abyss, are as riveting as the last third of Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas (and more depressing). DeRogatis wisely offsets the horror of Bangs' final years by including a postscript by the great man himself, a howlingly funny 1974 essay called ''How to Be a Rock Critic'' that should be required reading for anyone contemplating a career in music journalism.
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