• Three Gems

    Here are three literary gems that I’ve enjoyed immensely over the past few weeks: two slender books and a slender 80-minute film. But don’t let their size fool you. These texts offer more than many much heftier tomes. First is… more ›

  • FIT 2019

    The 21st annual Festival of Independent Theatres wraps up this weekend at Dallas’ Bath House Cultural Center on the shore of White Rock Lake. It’s maybe only the third or fourth time I’ve attended since moving (back) to Dallas, but… more ›

  • Peking Man

    The best writing sends you down random rabbit holes toward other great writing. Such was the case with a 1940 play by Cao Yu entitled Peking Man, which I first read about almost a year ago in Sergio Pitol’s The… more ›

  • Hiram Arnold

    For this Memorial Day, instead of visiting the grave of my Uncle Frank, who was killed in Vietnam three days before his twentieth birthday, or of my grandfather, whose body was still expelling shrapnel from WWII on his deathbed in… more ›

  • In Search of Babushka

    Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps is an eloquent travel memoir that also manages to do the heavy lifting required by great historical writing. Though German-born and typically Ireland-based, author Marcel Krueger is currently carrying out the… more ›

  • In Memory of Little Beasts

    I’m devastated, and I’ve been bawling my eyes out for days now. I went to bed Friday evening sure that my little family was safe and well, only to lose my little boy in the night. He wasn’t ill. Despite… more ›

  • The Lifeless Lou Reed

    Anthony DeCurtis’ Lou Reed: A Life is perhaps the worst nonfiction rock-and-roll book I’ve read, and I’ve read Marianne Faithfull’s (though much more likely, David Dalton’s) Faithfull: An Autobiography. Despite being a longtime reader and subscriber in high school and… more ›

  • Lucky’s Speech

    It was years—decades even—from the time I first read Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot before seeing a production of it. In that time, and really since the beginning, I was fascinated with Lucky’s speech, which still seems to me to be the… more ›

  • End of the Rainbow

    “Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life.” When asked about my thoughts regarding Gravity’s Rainbow, I responded that it easily has become one of my favorite books. Not my favorite, but certainly one… more ›

  • The Insolubility of Milk

      I learned about this collection of short stories by Simon Fruelund from his translator K.E. Semmel on Twitter. It’s a short 110-page book published in a gorgeous volume by Santa Fe Writers Project. But don’t let its thickness fool… more ›