MISTER MONKEY By Francine Prose Thanks to the films Hail, Caesar!, Bullets Over Broadway, Soapdish and Waiting for Guffman, we’re fully prepared for any behind-the-scenes tale about a production stuffed with former drama-class stars. There’s epic vanity, scenery-chewing divas, creative clashes (of the art vs. commerce kind), an army of wounded egos acting out, and […]

THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF ELVIS PRESLEY By Ted Harrison Next Aug. 16 will mark the 40th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, and that has the operators of Graceland, Presley’s Memphis home-cum-shrine-cum-official National Historic Landmark, bracing for a spike in visitors. Perhaps, though, the more significant anniversary comes next month. The immortal phrase “Elvis has […]

Denise Donlon (Photo by Peter Power/Toronto Star/Getty Images) FEARLESS AS POSSIBLE (UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES) By Denise Donlon How apropos that Denise Donlon chose a title at once patriotic — appropriated from the winning entry in a 1972 CBC Radio contest soliciting the best nation-defining simile — and self-effacing. As demonstrated in Fearless as Possible, Donlon […]

THEY CAN’T KILL US ALL By Wesley Lowery To the average American, the recent history of black resistance is fairly straightforward. A black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., named Mike Brown got involved in a physical confrontation with police officer Darren Wilson and wound up getting shot and killed. The stark difference of opinion between Ferguson’s […]

SWING TIME By Zadie Smith Growing up brown on a London council estate in the ’80s, Tracey and the unnamed narrator of Zadie Smith’s tour-de-force novel gravitate to each other by default. It was “as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both,” Smith writes. Endlessly rewinding Fred Astaire musicals, […]

ROLLING BLACKOUTS By Sarah Glidden For two months in 2010, American cartoonist Sarah Glidden travelled with two journalist friends and a former Marine through Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Since then, the region has been engulfed in turmoil, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions forced to flee. There’s been the Arab Spring, the rise of […]

JUST AROUND MIDNIGHT By Jack Hamilton When I was a kid, someone gave me a framed poster of Michael Keirstead’s “The Jam,” a collage of visages belonging to 113 iconic rock ’n’ roll artists: merely seven are African-American (and only four are women). Jimi Hendrix, it seems, was the last black man to make so-called […]

RASPUTIN Douglas Smith On Dec. 17, 1916, Grigori Efimovich Rasputin was poisoned, shot, left for dead and then, after crawling toward one of his assassins, shot at again and finally dumped into an icy river in St. Petersburg. Or not. Such is the mythology that surrounds him that even his murder is enveloped in layers […]

MOONGLOW Michael Chabon Conceived as an imagined history of the Chabon Scientific Company, whose ads for model rockets appeared at the back of American magazines in the late ’50s, Michael Chabon’s latest novel presents as a fake memoir in which the author’s self-named avatar acts as bedside confessor to his dying grandfather. Thanks to a […]

FAIRY TALES FOR THE DISILLUSIONED Gretchen Schultz and Lewis Seifert (eds.) Twisted fairy tales have a surprisingly lengthy history. That’s especially true in France, homeland of Charles Perrault, who popularized the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty in the 17th century. So when writers of the so-called decadent school, a kind of […]