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Revenge. No, not the Kiss album and not the Jim Harrison-written screenplay staring Kevin Costner, but Mary Morris’ 2004 novel now out in paperback from Picador. Revenge details the complicated relationship between a young painter named Andrea and a famous novelist named Loretta. Andrea is stuck in grief and obsession over an tragic accident involving [...]

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In sharp contrast to the coke-snorting, chick-grabbing, crowd-rocking antics of the music books I’ve recently been re-reading, On Celtic Tides: One Man’s Journey Around Ireland by Sea Kayak by Chris Duff provides a nice slow meditative pace. Duff’s twelve hundred-mile circumnavigation of the Emerald Isle provides both thrilling moments of adventure in the sea and [...]

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As if my bank account didn’t already suffer enough from my guitar obsession and my work with The Wrist Watch Review, a hip book expert just had to tell me about a book that is destined to damage my credit rating. First of all, let’s talk about the basic text. Robert Sabbag’s 1976 book Snowblind: [...]

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Arguably the definitive account book about the blues, Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta explores the origins of the music and its transformation from early field hollers to electric blues. Detailed treatments of greats such as Charley Patton, Elmore James, Son House, and many others, this book is [...]

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Continuing my recent fascination with music books, our Book of the Day is Bill Flanagan’s U2: At the End of the World. This book is no regular bio of a popular band. Arriving in Berlin as the wall was being torn down, Flanagan spent several years with U2 during the recording and touring for the [...]

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I don’t know why I’ve been on such a music and books kick lately. Maybe it’s because of Michael Schaub’s guide to rock novels presented over at BookSlut. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching two of my heroes, Gene Simmons and Tommy Lee, on their TV reality shows. Regardless, I’ve been going through some music [...]

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Don’t worry about saving food. Don’t even worry about toilet paper, electricity, clothing, or a radio. Just protect the booze. In John O’Brien’s The Assault on Tony’s a group of hardcore alcoholics barricade the door of their neighborhood bar and prepare to ride it out as a race riot engulfs the city outside. O’Brien, author [...]

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Feuding rappers from the East Coast and West Coast don’t have the market covered when it comes to musical warfare. So here’s our Book-of-the-Day, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind recount the story of how nearly 100 churches were burned and desecrated, while suicide, [...]

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The essays collected together in Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times present some interesting perspectives on the state of modern writing and publishing. In the introduction, written by editor Kevin Smokler, the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts Reading at Risk report serves as the catalyst for this examination of reading and writing. The report [...]

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In 1982, literary editor extraordinaire Bill Buford was living in London, running the prestigious magazine Granta. He caught a train at a rural railway station in Wales and was soon over-run by soccer (or football to them) supporters who were methodically destroying everything in their path. Fascinated by what he saw, Buford spent the next [...]

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Today’s Book-of-the-Day is The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer by Tom Dardis. The book examines the influence of alcohol on so many American authors. And the list is incredibly long. Five of the seven (at the time of publication) American Nobel laureates–Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck–were alcoholic. [...]

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Richard Price may now be better known for his film work or his urban crime dramas. But his early novels are excellent examinations of working-class families and the pressures they face. Probably my favorite early Price novel is Blood Brothers. Published in 1976, this book follows the difficult decisions facing eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco. His [...]

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If you’re like me, you only knew Arnold Schwarzenegger’s version of Conan. The muscle-bound, grunting misanthrope who famously uttered the response “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!” when asked the meaning of life. But the actual Conan stories, written by Robert E. Howard in [...]

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This is probably hard for many of us to believe, thanks to the Ashton Kutcher-Paris Hilton-That Fez Guy-brainwashing our culture has endured, but the truth is that there really was a man who went by the nickname Von Dutch. And in spite of stupid trucker hats, expensive jeans, and all the other crap we know [...]

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