How To Try A Murder (by Michael Kurland) is a lightning-quick overview of general courtroom conventions and the like. You got yer elements of th’ crime, yer arrest/indictment, yer trial preparations, and so on and so forth, on through to the verdict. Along the way you get general procedural info, neat anecdotal facts and historical […]

Chuck Palahniuk’s work is really something of a canon. Don’t be confused by all the different character names and crazy plot twists that happen from one book to the next; it’s really all part of the same story. Just because they have different names and different problems and different scams (and they all have scams) […]

“Do killers, artists, and terrorists need one another?” (inside book jacket) Generally, I can’t say I’m a fan of literary analysis. Not even a disgruntled fan. But Crimes of Art + Terror, its literary analytical elements substantial as they are, is pretty slick. CoA+T seeks to examine the entanglements between so-called ‘transgressive art’—art that ‘pushes […]

…because you couldn’t decide whether or not you really wanted to read this book. Yeah, right. So, um, yeah, a great book, this Fight Club. Hands-down (well, almost—I’m not sure about Americana) this is the best first novel I’ve ever read, i.e., the best “this-is-so-and-so’s-first-novel” book, so-and-so in this case being Chuck Palahniuk. Brilliant, really. […]

The problem with this book is, it’s living proof that an excellent writer can take tried-and-true elements—things that, by themselves, seem like great ideas—and combine them in a wholly unsatisfying way. Kind of how an award-winning chef might take your five favorite foods and combine them into an unrecognizable, unappetizing, putrid mush. Another (related) problem […]