BIBLIOFILE
The Drudge Manifesto
by Matt Drudge
(Penguin Putnam, 247 pages, $22.95)

Matt Drudge, for those who do not know, is the guy who broke the Monica Lewinsky story on his website. It is a guilty secret of mine that I check in to the Drudge Report website regularly, so I was intrigued by the chance to review Drudge's book, The Drudge Manifesto.

Unfortunately, Drudge devotes most of his text to showing people how cool it is to be famous like him. If you want an insider's view of the Monica story, you will be disappointed; he reveals no secrets here. In apparent awe of his own story, Drudge feels compelled to preface the book with the words, "This is not a work of fiction...although some poetic license has been taken." Would that this license were put to good use. Instead, there's page after page of failed attempts at clever prose. It's representative of this work's intellectual weight that in Manifesto each footnote leads not to a source but to fan mail: "I believe the Drudge Report stands as revolutionary for our world today, as Gutenberg's printing press did for his world," reads a representative sample. This is a poor man's McSweeney's.

That said, Drudge seems to tire eventually of self-aggrandizement around page 140, and the book actually does become interesting. His ringside view on the effect of the media mergers on the Washington, D.C., press provides some insight--as when at a press conference a media mogul quips to a reporter, "Do we own you yet?" But to plumb this book for these few perceptive crumbs is, well, drudging. Nick Budnick

Notta Lotta Love Stories: My Evil Twin Sister #4
by Amber Gayle
(Evil Twin Publications, 43 pages, $5)

In Notta Lotta Love Stories, Amber Gayle's 'zine takes us on a heartfelt trip through vegan-post-adolescent-angst-land, where the men are sensitive and the women are adventuresome and curious.

The first few pages contain stark black-and-white images with small text boxes, which read like tiny love poems of the unrequited variety. The body of the book hosts a series of self-conscious journal entries detailing the sights, sounds and smells of hot, organic hippie lust. "These are stories about people I've loved for an ultimate purpose that remains mysterious. How can such definite emotions lead us down dead end lanes? But they do...and the rising and falling is part of the passion that keeps us moving through the world with our eyes wide open." And move she does. In 43 pages Gayle gives us glimpses into 10 of her significant relationships and alludes to several other complicated crushes. She experiments and discovers with close friends and strangers, men and women. The narrative is honest, well-crafted and teeming with all of the hair-tearing, gut-wrenching, teary-eyed drama of someone in her early 20s. Gayle's descriptions of the raw, natural settings that juxtapose the internal terrain of her struggles work nicely.

If you're nostalgic about Green Tortoise bus tours, fried tofu, pissing in the woods and falling in and out of love as often as you change your clothes, you'll find Notta Lotta Love Stories sincere and intriguing. Even if you're not, Gayle's finely crafted prose and flair for the poetic will offer a satisfying read. Ritah Parrish

Pu-239, and Other Russian Fantasies
By Ken Kalfus
(Washington Square Press, 289 pages, $13.95)

The subtitle to Ken Kalfus' book of short stories, "Russian Fantasies," is entirely appropriate. Exploring various episodes of Russian life and history, the stories are propelled by an interesting admixture, almost equal parts academic research and speculative fantasy. Kalfus, who spent four years living in Moscow, takes the historical and contemporary touchstones of "Russian-ness"--Stalin, Russian Jews, Chechnyan rebels, crumbled nuclear industries--as his starting points, but his imagination takes over from there.

"The [vodka] bottles are poised like ICBM's beneath the kiosks' rusting, corrugated metal roofs while, somewhere else, ICBM's are poised like bottles beneath the rusting roofs of missile silos," Kalfus observes at one point, and it's a passage representative of the book as a whole. Carefully considered and often poetic, the stories are nevertheless focused primarily on images already well-worn in our popular conception of Russia: vodka and ICBM's, Sputnik and Stalin, etc. Kalfus' use of these images is entertaining, but it isn't until the collection's last story, a novella titled "Peredelkino," that he moves beyond predictable symbols. Also, the slower narrative rhythms of the novella format suit Kalfus as he depicts the physical and ideological temptations faced by a writer comfortably supported by the Communist Party. The result is the collection's best story, more the stuff of true human yearning and turmoil than material for a piece on the History Channel.

Pu-239 is a skillful short-story collection and a worthy contribution to our sense of what it means to be Russian. It also leaves one with the sense that Kalfus may hold even more potential as a novelist.
Dan DeWeese