[Illustration by ALEX FINE] EDITOR’S NOTE: Rick Moody will be speaking at the Free Library on July 29th. The following interview ran back in 2007, upon the release of Right Livelihoods. BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Rick Moody tackles the hallucinatory pathologies of American paranoia in Right Livelihoods, a collection of three thematically-connected novellas. Each story centers on a paranoid protagonist who serves as unreliable narrator and as a result, the reader spends an awful lot of time wondering just what the hell is going on — which only adds to the ultra-vivid realism and disconcerting familiarity of it all. […]

TOM BROKAW: It was one of those memorable pieces of literary fiction that came along at an impressionable time in my life, and also in the country’s life. Dr. King had already started the movement at that point, we were paying attention on national television every night on the network news to what was going on in the South, and this book spoke to us. I knew people like that, who were willing to stand up in these kinds of communities against the conventional wisdom of the time. Racism didn’t stop at the Mason-Dixon Line. A lot of those same […]

[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BALTIMORE CITY PAPER: It’s 10 years since Anthony Bourdain delivered Kitchen Confidential, the “obnoxious, over-testosteroned account of my life in the restaurant business” as he told The Observer in 2006. A classic of its kind, Confidential was a pugnacious, take-no-prisoners look into the murky world of restaurant kitchens and the misfits and miscreants who inhabit them. Above all, it was brilliantly written and had the ring of truth–a memoir/rant by one of the culinary world’s foot soldiers, a battle-scarred veteran who’d done his time and lived to tell the frequently sordid and salacious tale. Cooks across […]

THE INDEPENDENT: Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain’s dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published. The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century. […]

[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BALTIMORE CITY PAPER: “Lovers give each other Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, even though its mood offers no consolation, let alone ecstasy,” veteran British sportswriter and music critic Richard Williams writes near the top of The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (Norton), his thoughtful look at what went into, and came out of, Davis’s 1959 album. “But those who give it want to share its richness of spirit, its awareness of the infinite, and its extraordinary quality of constantly revealing more to those who know it best. Sometimes […]

Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays Vol. 2 1946-1992 By Charles Bukowski City Lights Publishers April 2010, 274 pp. BY PAUL MAHER JR. BOOK CRITIC Charles Bukowski, the ever-prolific even in death American novelist and poet, continues to satisfy the insatiable hunger of his vast cult-audience for more, not with bottom drawer rejected pieces, but with significant work that instills into his canon an ever-growing indication of his true importance as a man of letters. The posthumous shadow he casts across American lit only continues to loom larger with each passing year. Editor David Calonne has ably compiled […]