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I didn’t make it to the opening ceremonies of the newly-renovated Cambridge Main Library but I did join the slightly dazed after-work throng milling around the spacious and welcoming environment toward the end of the library’s first full day. (I left with 6 books, which seemed to make me a bit of a lightweight.) The […]

Walking home from The Independent last Sunday, we espied the new-to-the-hood Hub Comics, from which we emerged with a slightly-inconvenient-to-carry-home mix of goodies.
They had a couple compliations of Mike Allred’s Madman, and I bought both in a fit of nostalgia.
If you don’t know Madman, “the world’s snappiest comic magazine”, the titular protagonist is one […]

Pretty much ever since the genres science fiction, fantasy, and horror have existed as distinct marketing categories, there have been periodic movements seeking to un-define them as such. In the 60’s there was “The New Wave.” In the 80’s some bruited about the awkward, demi-hemispherist phrase “North American magical realism.” And more recently, an unruly […]

If I were dictator of the world, everybody who wanted to form a band to play in front of people would be legally required to watch Standing in the Shadows of Motown first, and everyone who wanted to sign a record deal would be required to read Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be. In my […]

I found Gray’s enormous, dense history of The Clash mostly fascinating, but the obviousness of Gray’s authorial agendas bugged me. The book is subtitled “The Story and Myth of the Clash,” and Gray spends a lot of effort looking for the points of divergence between the (hi)story and the myth of the band. He provides […]

Laurie Lindeen’s rags-to-well,rags chronicle of her band Zuzu’s Petals reminded strongly of Tommy Womack’s excellent and thematically similar Cheese Chronicles, with the added fillip that Laurie hooks up with someone Much More Famous midway through the band’s career arc.
Almost all of the book is written in the present tense. Lindeen is sometimes deliberately cagey about […]

Then again, maybe not.
I just requested Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from my library. It doesn’t provide a lot of information on the queue structure, but it did tell me:

1106 holds on first copy returned of 428 copies

My first thought was “holy crud, 1106 holds!?” But my second, presumably smarter, thought is “holy crud, […]

It was Leslie What’s contributions to Small Beer Press’s pretty-much-mostly slipstream zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet that made me really take note of her name. Her stories for that magazine fit what I think of as the general mode of slipstream (or interstitial, or new-wave fabulist, or whatever you want to call it) fiction.
My […]