Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

                 Required Reading In a Time Magazine interview, Sherman Alexie mocks himself when he says, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought back in 1987: What’s going to make me really economically successful? Poems about Indian guys. I’m a capitalistic genius,” yet the joke is actually real. Alexie has had a lot of success writing about Indian guys. Taking stories from his earlier works, he’s added a few, shaken well, then published this collection: Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories , and I'd call it required reading. Some of the characters draw on Alexie's own history: hydrocephalus, basketball, complicated father/son relationships, living on the reservation, and leaving it behind. Many of the characters appear in multiple stories; themes crop up again and again; and through it all you see his sense of humor, his struggles with alcoholism, and his willingness to tackle reservation life that mark this as clearly a bo...

Review of Carlos Andres Gomez' book Man Up: Cracking the Code of Modern Manhood Enjoy!

Saw a posting today about the 20 greatest Dystopian books, and thought we needed a treatment for Conspiracy Lit. as well. You ask, "What is Conspiracy Lit?" Conspiracy Lit. is any fictional book that poses that their is some sort of all knowing, super secret society pulling the strings. Here's my list: 1.  Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 .  Wow! I love this book.   I've loaned this book out so many times, I can't even keep a copy on my shelf.   Opened the door to Pynchon for me--which is a pretty strange world as well. 2.  Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus Trilogy:  The Eye in the Pyramid, the Golden Apple, and the Pyramid.  Technically, 3 books but when I was turned on to this one it was in the trilogy format so I read it as 3 books. 3.  Robert Anton Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati.  Yes, I'm skipping the Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy.   It is a good book, but not really...