The Rabbit has long complained that Keith Jarrett’s standards trio, fine as it is, limited the pianist. Maybe that ‘s because the Rabbit was one of those “hippies,” as one reviewer described his audience, who found salvation in Jarrett’s early solo work, beginning in 1971 with Facing You and continuing through…

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In the failed-males-sabotaging-their-own-lives genre of storytelling,  sub-genres abound. The latest variation takes its cues from our on-going economic conditions; guys lose their jobs and go into free fall as does Matthew in Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets.

Sam Lipsyte’s take on this theme finds Milo Burke (this is…

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Fortune magazine has allegedly rejected a cover illustration that Chris Ware provided. Check it out…seems it might strike a little too close to home for the pro-finance cheerleaders at Fortune. Our favorite part of the drawing? The chopper dropping cash on the 500 edifice? The Chinese off-loading dollars? Or that tea…

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With the premier this Sunday (April 11) of Treme, HBO’s new dramatic series on post-Katrina jazz in New Orleans, the Rabbit reprints his feature from the 2006 Playboy Jazz Festival program, published in June of that year (some nine months after the disaster) that focused on the heroic and self-sacrificing efforts…

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Short story writers are most like magicians, plying their craft with illusion and misdirection. Both want their audiences to believe what they present, to think it as real. They don’t want them to notice or even think about what goes on to make the magic.

Which makes Thomas Lynch a magical…

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