A Visit to Bizarro Con 2015
It was sometime after the man in the mushroom cap sang a song about earwigs yet well before Werner Herzog’s nihilistic re-imagining of “The Wizard…
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The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
Sinatra: The Chairman by James Kaplan
I Lost It at the Video Store by Tom Roston
David Lynch: The Man from Another Place by Dennis Lim
Stir by Jessica Fechtor
Corinna Chapman Mysteries: When Novels Are So Bad, They’re Good
Fixing Fashion: Rethinking the Way We Make, Market and Buy Our Clothes by Michael Lavergne
Darjeeling: The Colorful History and Precarious Fate of the World’s Greatest Tea by Jeff Koehler
A Slice Of Britain by Caroline Taggert
I blame Nigel Slater. Were it not for his BBC show back in November, Nigel Slater’s Icing on the Cake (the third in a series…
Stephen Merritt: The Scrabble Interview
Last year when Magnetic Fields guy Stephen Merritt and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast’s book 101 Two-Letter Words (Amazon, iBooks, Powell’s), which aside from being…
The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky
Fresh. Delicious. Perfectly cooked (oh, how I hate that one). The way we talk about food, especially how it’s described on menus, plays a huge…
Twelve-Cent Archie by Bart Beaty
Though focusing on Archie comics, which we will get to in a moment, Twelve-Cent Archie (Amazon, iBooks, Powell’s) points to a wider anxiety in comic books….
Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind by Josh Karp
For film buffs, movies that were never made or have never been seen hold an undeniable fascination. Last year’s documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune detailed the impressive…
The WORN Archive: Fashion Journal about the Art, Ideas, & History of What We Wear by Serah-Marie McMahon
I’m not sure how I missed the boat when it comes to Worn (Amazon, Powell’s). I had always sort of known of their existence, but…
Arthur Elgort: The Big Picture
The photographs are, of course, iconic. As in, I remember exactly where I was when I opened that September 1991 issue of Vogue to flip…
15 Essential Science Fiction Novels of the 19th & 20th Centuries
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge An amazing tale of human’s first contact with non-humans, which is also a prequel to Vinge’s earlier…
Wrapped in Plastic: Twin Peaks by Andy Burns
When Laura Palmer said “I’ll see you again in 25 years” in the Twin Peaks series finale back in 1991, few of the show’s remaining…
Planet of the Apes: Evolution of the Legend by Joe Fordham and Jeff Bond
In the 1970s, there were few fandom manias more intense among kids than Planet of the Apes. Star Trek couldn’t really hold a candle to…
A Food Writer’s Favourite Food Books
If you ask most people, their best-loved books about food are probably cookbooks. They likely don’t actually cook from these tomes but rather consider them…