I’m very impressed by demons in. demons out by Travis Lawrence, who also runs a website called A Poet Instead. Lawrence’s words present simple, transparent epiphanies:

the city is crying
cop cars
ambulance, ambulance
falling to pieces
throw the bodies into sewer streams
wash away the skeletons of yesterday
cages upon cages
give us some air to breathe
ants bump together in single file lines

But it’s the sketches and illustrations that knock you out. Lawrence is an accomplished cartoonist whose work recalls Jules Feiffer and John Holmstrom, and the …

I’ve been absolutely flooded with review copies lately (and some people worry that the internet is making books go away? HAH.) I can’t fit all of this month’s new book notices into one article, so I’ll cover some today and will return with more tomorrow.

Wolf Boy by Evan Kulhman is a new kind of hybrid vehicle for fiction: a straightforward story that morphs into a comic book for certain key scenes, then returns to peaceful prose. Most of the time, …

Sorry I’ve been away. I’m working on the next set of LitKicks reviews as well as getting distracted by the nice weather. I should be back tomorrow, but till then I thought you might enjoy:

1. Catching up with Harper Lee.

2. Checking out Nasdijj’s blog, which focuses on the plight of children with AIDS. Tim Barrus is trying to put his recent identity scandal behind him and is now openly juggling both his real and presumed identities, which sounds fair enough …

It’s always good to see Luc Sante show up in the New York Times Book Review, and this week’s cover article on Timothy Leary: A Biography by Robert Greenfield does not disappoint. As only the best reviewers do, Sante allows his subject to occupy every bit of space in his article, delivering a fascinating summary that leaves me hungry for more. I’d forgotten how interesting and contradictory this crazed Harvard professor was (on the positive side, Leary had a great wit; on …

Slate is celebrating its tenth birthday this month with a retrospective book, The Best of Slate. The online magazine also convened a debate last night at the New York Public Library between three contentious media stars with wildly different ideas about the future of online and traditional journalism.

Slate is an electronic publication designed for readers who are ambivalent about the internet. It’s named after a physical writing surface, and its masthead has always been crowded with comforting names from print journalism …

I met Philomene Long last year at a poetry reading at Vox Pop in Brooklyn. I knew of her as a veteran of the Venice Beach, California beat poetry scene and as a filmmaker whose documentary The Beats: An Existential Comedy I once reviewed (favorably) at LitKicks. Onstage at Vox Pop, she had a healthy ferocity that reminded me of Anne Waldman, and a strong artistic/spiritual core that reminded me of Patti Smith.

I talked to her afterwards about the ongoing Los …

Since I’ve been known to sneer at the work of novelist Jonathan Lethem, one might think I’d automatically disagree with a strong position he takes in a just-published Salon article (via Bookslut) about a major new architectural development in Brooklyn, New York.

In fact, I gave Lethem’s open letter to Frank Gehry a fair read — and I disagree with him, not automatically but completely nonetheless. He is concerned about a loud, ambitious new real estate project designed to change the landscape of …

Since I’ve been known to sneer at the work of novelist Jonathan Lethem, one might think I’d automatically disagree with a strong position he takes in a just-published Salon article (via Bookslut) about a major new architectural development in Brooklyn, New York.

In fact, I gave Lethem’s open letter to Frank Gehry a fair read — and I disagree with him, not automatically but completely nonetheless. He is concerned about a loud, ambitious new real estate project designed to change the landscape of …

This is your New York Times Book Review on ginkgo biloba, or something, today. The intellect factor is at an unusually high level, with a Robert Stone cover story on John Updike, a Harold Bloom essay contemplating the legacy of Rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and a brain-cell heavy endpaper by Lee Siegel on the legacy of eccentric literary critic Paul Zweig.

The honest truth is, after a weekend of Father’s Day festivities, freeze tag, swimming pools and barbecues, I’m in no shape to …

I don’t usually feel awestruck when I hear a famous writer speak. But I’ll make an exception for John Updike, who faced a packed house at the Celeste Bartos Forum in the New York Public Library on Thursday night, because I have enjoyed so many of his books for so long, and because I’ve never had the chance to see this author in person before.

He saunters onstage to mild applause, slender and now thoroughly white-haired, but thankfully not wearing the bright write shirt he …