Books OK, so a Nebraskan meatpacker wakes up after a car accident and thinks his sister and dog are impostors (The Echo Maker). Or: A free-flowing computer network is taught to understand literature, only t ...   More

Books Gin Phillips has a good, strong voice. It brays over butter churns; it whinnies on a first date; it moans when a miner’s son gets hit by a truck. The Birmingham-based writer’s episodic acc ...   More

Books It is my impression, based more on gut feeling than evidence, that the majority of contemporary poets are more concerned with the way their poems sound read aloud than the way they look on the page. ...   More

Books Manil Suri is a man of many talents, but perhaps the most useful of them is flying under the radar. Even halfway through The Age of Shiva (Norton, 448 pages, $24.95), you’d swear that his new no ...   More

Books You’d think Joe McGinniss Jr. was from Vegas. The familiar derision with which he addresses its cookie-cutter subdivisions or its piddling gallery scene; the ease with which he moves from the fa ...   More

Books Although he presented only four ways to do it, Paul Simon suggested there must be 50 ways to leave your lover. Whether or not there actually are 50 ways to leave your lover, there are certainly more t ...   More

Books Jim Wallis’ previous book, God’s Politics , was a Book of Revelation for evangelical Christians whipsawed between the strident puritanism of the religious right and the alternative of sepa ...   More

Books For better or worse, common-enough wisdom among event promoters is that audiences for different media don’t mingle well. Just as you don’t put Trace Adkins country roughnecks in a room wit ...   More

Books In Them , Nathan McCall’s debut novel (Atria Books, 338 pages, $25) , the title refers both to the black residents of one Atlanta inner-city ward and the young white “urban homesteaders&rd ...   More

Books A friend of mine has a habit, when he comes across a new short story, of immediately abandoning it if he comes across the words “my father” within the first couple paragraphs. Lately this ...   More