Archive for June, 2011

The literature of shoplifting

“I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural born thief,” wrote Jack Kerouac, who, alongside St. Augustine and Mark Twain, features in Rachel Shteir’s cultural history of shoplifting.

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Football and nachos, the Texan way

If you’ve read of my love for Friday Night Lights, you might remember I grew up rooting for the Cowboys. But you did you know there’s another, better, more authentic way to make nachos than the soggy pile-up we’re all used to getting at bars after too many beers at 2 o’clock in the morning? All mysteries (and recipes) revealed . . .

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Male muses & inner dicks: I talk with Kate Christensen

At the Awl, Kate Christensen and I discuss her latest novel, The Astral, and many other things, including cheating hearts, failed marriages, bad therapy, male muses, inner dicks, and (briefly) her next book, Gin on the Lanai. “I write about people wrestling with various internal conflicts in ways that ripple outwards and cause more external conflicts,” she says. “Repressed, obedient, . . .

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On Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

“All autobiographies are, in part, lies,” says Touré, who sees Manning Marable’s “more complete and unvarnished” new Malcolm X biography as a worthy supplement to The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

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