Weimar Berlin’s Morbidly Erotic Fascinations

Written by Richard Byrne on . Posted in Books, Posts

As a cultural construct, Weimar Berlin is Atlantis. It’s become a fabulous tale so freighted with hype, misconception and myth that it has sunken to a point where one questions if it ever existed at all except in its renderings–Isherwood, Cabaret, Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Some of Weimar Berlin has come down to us more or
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DC’s Most Insufferable Bookstore Generates Last Year’s Worst Piece of Journalism

Written by None - Do not Delete on . Posted in Books, Posts

In the end, it wasn’t even close.  The other day I was mulling over what I thought was the worst piece of journalism of the year 2000. Not surprisingly, The New York Times was at the top of the list, for either their bogus story on how federal agencies and public parks were rejecting the
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Creepy Sex for Little Girls

Written by Marty Beckerman on . Posted in Arts & Film, Books

You wouldn’t think the book too bizarre from the back cover. It actually sounds quite mundane: “Yesterday’s children learned about the birds and bees in the street, from friends and other unknowledgeable sources. Most people agree that that day is past, the sexual revolution has arrived. But where can today’s child turn for information, not
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Creepy Sex for Little Girls

Written by Marty Beckerman on . Posted in Books, Posts

You wouldn’t think the book too bizarre from the back cover. It actually sounds quite mundane: "Yesterday’s children learned about the birds and bees in the street, from friends and other unknowledgeable sources. Most people agree that that day is past, the sexual revolution has arrived. But where can today’s child turn for information, not
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Teller’s When I’m Dead, All This Will Be Yours Uncovers a Father’s Secret Life

Written by Jim Knipfel on . Posted in Books, Posts

When I’m Dead, All This Will Be Yours by Teller (Blast Books, 144 pages, $24.95) Teller laughed when I said this. "They’re very likable, first of all," he told me from Las Vegas, where he was preparing to head out for a month of touring with his partner, Penn Jillette. "They’re very unselfish people. Part
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Homoeroticism and Christian Doctrine: A Talk with Novelist Henry Flesh

Written by J.T. Leroy on . Posted in Books, Posts

Henry Flesh What inspired you to write something so sci-fi in nature as Michael? I don’t really see Michael as science fiction, particularly since there’s no actual science involved in it. Rather, it’s a fantasy, somewhat mythical, a homoerotic take on contemporary Christian fundamentalists’ eschatological theories of the end of the world. At first glance
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Reviews of Lance Olsen’s Freaknest and Sewing Shut My Eyes, plus Brian Evenson’s Contagion

Written by Bob Riedel on . Posted in Books, Posts

Freaknest by Lance Olsen (Wordcraft of Oregon, 258 pages, $12) Sewing Shut My Eyes by Lance Olsen (FC2, 143 pages, $11.95) In the centerpiece section of his auspicious 1994 Knopf debut, Altmann’s Tongue, Brian Evenson’s linked stories of random cruelty by a ragtag army that may or may not be under siege made Cormac McCarthy’s
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Arming America

Written by Norman Kelley on . Posted in Books, Posts

Arming America By Michael Bellesiles (Knopf, 603 pages, $30) The new scholarship, according to David Thelen, the Journal’s editor, was viewed as "too obscure to appreciate and too remote from everyday life." He believed that the profession had gotten to the point where dazzling people with the unfamiliar and erudite had become more important than
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Talking with Michelle Tea, Chronicler of Hip Young Dykes

Written by J.T. Leroy on . Posted in Books, Posts

Writer and performance artist Michelle Tea’s Valencia (Seal Press, 256 pages, $13) is an hilarious, poignant and straight-shooting book that reads like an HBO Undercover episode on hip young dykes in San Francisco. Not content to preach only to the converted, however, Tea went on the road as a cofounder of Sister Spit, a traveling
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