He begins somewhere in the back of the bookstore.  The bearded guy who announced him looks befuddled at first until we all hear him approaching through the rows of real crime books.

A friend of mine who’ll remain unnamed often tells a Waits story (most likely apocryphal, as if there were any other kind of Waits story)  worth re-telling: This friend, see, is coming off a bender in LA–uncertain, for instance, of how he’d arrived in LA in the first place.  He is certain only that someone has forced a roll of cheap toilet paper down his throat during a blackout and he wants to remain stuck shirtless...

Why review now and not wait until I’m finished?  Two reasons: I’m no good at lying, and this will assure completion. You’re probably reading something that’s wasting your time and these books could solve that. The Instructions is a big ambitious beguiling book.  Adam Levin is genius material (and, yes, I know the dangers and futility of such a moniker, but still…).  He constructs a thousand plus pages of...

Need some help here. I’ve been listening with continuing fascination and awe, frankly, to the album Spark of Being, the soundtrack, performed by Dave Douglas and Keystone, to Bill Morrison’s cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein. DJ Olive’s textures and Gene Lake’s nervy drumming, in particular, create a a sonic approximation of what The Creature may have felt stumbling into its body.  First, does anyone out there...

Kinetic typography animation using the wonderful words of acclaimed writer and actor Stephen Fry. Agreed.

This is an account of a disastrous sailing trip Dylan James Brock took in June 2011. View Part 1 here 2 Before the captain bought the forty-one foot sailboat in May 2011, it was owned by a hoarder. Lucille crammed every corner of the boat’s two cabins with assorted trinkets that the captain had cleared out over the course of a few days. All he had chosen to keep  of the clutter was a drawer full of brand new, blank baseball caps,...

…the sign on the corner building read, beside which a street light arched like a back and two tangueros strode across the cover of the leather-bound journal that was to be my first purchase in Buenos Aires. “Little road or journey,” it signifies, though the flight to South America is not diminutive. Distance is not the point, Proust says, of travel, but that discovery in oneself of other eyes. One looks and looks, agape at the...

My novel Enigmatic Pilot and the story cycle it’s part of have stirred comparisons with Pynchon, which generally pleases me. But when the book was featured in a course at Seattle University, I was asked some pointed questions by students about who I personally think my river sources are. Here’s how I answered. William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick (long ago a neighbor of mine in Berkeley) remain very important writers to me. I...

While sitting down at the computer for a few hours two nights ago to compile that list of June writing contest deadlines and calls for submissions, I came across an awesome new independent literary press based out of St. Louis. Architrave Press, founded this year, selects poems for publication and then offers them for sale individually, the same way you can buy a song from iTunes. Their website isn’t set to launch until September, but...

Work is slow. School is finished. The kiddos are away at camp. Across most of the country, it’s already too effing hot to go outside without immediately feeling that you will most definitely perish from heat exhaustion within 60 seconds. You’re mostly just bullshitting around until you take your vacation anyway. Need something to do? Stop drinking lemonade and fanning yourself with back issues of Maxim. Get your voice out there....