I spent a good deal of time wrapped up in Tony Bacon’s Million Dollar Les Paul: In Search of the Most Valuable Guitar in the World this past weekend. It’s an engaging read that is an exhaustive look into the roots of a collecting craze involving 1958 to 1960 Gibson Les Paul guitars.
Bacon points out [...]
Louis Bayard reviewed Matt Bondurant’s new novel, The Wettest County in the World for Salon.com.
The novel, based on Bondurant’s grandfather, deals with crime, corruption, and moonshine in the hills of rural Virginia. “Bondurant’s bootleggers are eminently touchable and, even in their worst moments, touching,” Bayard writes. “This is a lyrical and riveting book about ‘the [...]
I wrote about Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society for CrunchGear. Click here to read the entire piece.
Manjoo’s text is intriguing. He points out how, as people, we have always had a tendency to believe what we want to believe. However, recent technological advances make it easier for us to [...]
Jim DeRogatis, pop music critic of The Chicago Sun Times eviscerates Ian Christie’s Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga.
I read the book the day it was first released and didn’t find it to be that bad. It wasn’t as good as I was hoping, but I didn’t think it was awful. My main criticism of [...]
I’ve been pretty hard on writing/publishing books. Far too many of them are just garbage. And I’ve been pretty vocal about the titles that comprise my Mount Rushmore of writing texts. An interesting new addition to the discussion is Walter Mosley’s This Year You Write Your Novel.
A couple of reviews in the New York Times yesterday caught my attention. James Poniewozik reviewed Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and found it “perceptive and and darkly entertaining.”
And Walter Kirn reviewed William Vollman’s newest book, Poor People. Kirn makes an interesting point that Vollman’s own motives in all of his adventurous project [...]
My review of The Garbageman and the Prostitute by Zack Wentz appeared on PopMatters last Friday. If you didn’t see it, be sure to check out the entire piece here.
And we’ll let Zack keep on keeping on here at Slushpile.net since he was kind enough to interview Kevin Sampsell for me. Check out the next post.
My review of T.R. Pearson’s Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting appeared on PopMatters yesterday. Click here to read the review in its entirety because this is an astounding book that details the true story of a single man who sailed a raft from South America to Australia when he was well-past retirement [...]
Be sure to pick up the August issue of Paste on newsstands now. Besides being an all around kick-ass magazine, this particular issue features my review of Altaf Tyrewala’s No God In Sight. This is a fascinating book about modern life in India. It won’t be released until August 22, but it’s definitely one to add to [...]
Anthony Bozza’s work covers the gamut of writing styles and content. From humor to heavy-duty criticism, his books elevate the music writing genre. A big fan of fiction writers ranging from Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov to Chuck Palahniuk, Katherine Dunn, and Amy Hempel, Bozza’s work has a literary quality to it that a [...]