Jazz critics have made a living declaring that John Coltrane was the most influential saxophonist of the modern jazz era. But listen to the current crop of practicing sax players and very few of them sound like Coltrane. In fact, saxophonist go out of their way to avoid such comparisons.…

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Living underground to avoid arrest suggests two stories: the crimes that force one to disappear and the circumstances that pull one back into the light. Kunzru’s novel of an English political radical in the 1960s runs these tales in parallel. Young Chris Carver is drawn into protests against the war…

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It’s the commonly used coffee house criteria to define enjoyable fiction: “I identified with the characters.” If we recognize ourselves or others we know in a story, we’re more susceptible to being drawn in. But the characters in The Book Of Other People, an anthology of character sketches/short stories, aren’t…

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The 1960s were all about peace and love, right? Forty years later, we know better; hindsight and all, though it was well then apparent. The assassinations, the race riots, the Asian War and the authoritarian crack-down on sometimes violent political and cultural protest all took the shine off the age…

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The answer to why a decade separates Thomas McGuane’s last two novels is as complicated as one of the charming scoundrels who populate his eight previous works. Rumor had it that the writer, rancher and former movie director had grown tired of the publishing business.

“That was part of it,” McGuane…

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Let’s face it: some guys are jerks. Ben Tanaka, the lead in writer-illustrator Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings, is one of them. Cynical, selfish, bitter and indulgent, he’s the kind of fool who covers his sexual insecurities with a façade of righteous self-confidence and a porno collection. By any measure—and…

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We have seen the future, thanks to science fiction author Philip K. Dick, and it looks like the present… even when it’s set in the past. No, we don’t fly around it rocket-powered hovercraft, there are no colonies on the moon let alone Mars and we don’t carry around laser…

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Our choice for the great American novel is not about a boy named Huck, a sailor obsessed with a whale or a jazz-age millionaire. It’s about a cat–an evil, hallucinatory, blue cat–named Waldo. And it’s not a novel at all. It’s a comic.

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Pantheon), Kim Deitch’s…

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The last conversation I had with my grandfather was about train hopping. By then, he’d decided I was a shiftless, long-haired hippie of dubious political beliefs and used silence to show disapproval. But driving back down from Lake Arrowhead to Riverside after a family outing in search of snow we began—I don’t remember how—talking about his experience riding the rails.

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I’ve always wondered: If love is blind, why is sex so much better with one’s eyes open? There’s an essay in Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love From Tin House that addresses that question in reverse fashion. If the person having sex is blind, is their love more visible?

“You…

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