Books

A gloriously real, Solar-centric space opera that heralds the dawn of a new SF paradigm.

Do you recall the tagline from the very first Superman movie? "You'll believe a man can fly!" Well, I'm tempted to craft such a hyperbolic assertion for China Miéville's off-the-wall yet utterly convincing new "all-ages" novel, Railsea. Somethin...

The science-fictional motif of lethal, infectious information -- bad memes -- is a fascinating one, with an extended history. One of the earliest instances is Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow from 1895. Chambers's conceit is a malevolent play: r...

Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old barns, tattoos, fruit crate labels, hot rod embellishments -- all these media and many other non-galleried forms have hosted and fostered esthetic delig...

When a wild, irreverent, and brash publication named Mad debuted in August 1952, it did so as a standard-issue comic book, employing the traditional format which today has come to be retronymically called a "floppy" or "pamphlet." With issue 24, Mad re...

Why Madeleine L'Engle's star-spanning vision found its destination in readers' hearts.

The inimitably demented and lapidarily hilarious Mark Leyner returns in fine fettle with a rollicking new meta-fictional novel, his first paraliterary excursion in fourteen years. The affect of the book? Drunken sagaciousness, manic sobriety, crazy wis...

It's a shame, in a way, that Graham Greene brilliantly and decisively utilized the title A Burnt-Out Case for his 1960 novel about a hapless, wounded antihero whom passion and art have abandoned. The title would have been so perfect for an installment ...

Secret passages, doomsday devices, and fiendish masterminds populate a comic thriller.

There must be a rule of thumb in pop-culture archaeology that states that the allure of any topic is inversely related to its assigned importance in the affairs of humanity. The more trivial the subject, the dearer it is to most of its partisans, and t...

This volume of selected letters written by the novelist and counterculture icon William Burroughs during the period from 1959 to 1974, is a remarkable testament, since it manages to confirm Burroughs's legendary public persona while simultaneously shat...

Recently some friends and I were discussing entertainers who had exceedingly long careers.  A consensus emerged that George Burns, with over ninety active years in the biz at the time of his death at one hundred years old, had established a record...