Jay Aubrey-Herzog

By Jonathan Lethem. Doubleday. Jonathan Lethem’s long been trying to create a hybrid form: an omnivorous novel that blends closely observed detail and vividly drawn realistic characters with elements of the fantastic. His earliest books were marketed as science fiction, but even then his models were those at the margins of the genre like J. […]

A new book by the mysterious novelist and former Humboldt resident is always a special occasion, but this time Thomas Pynchon has offered up something different. Instead of the densely allusive historical novels that made his reputation, he here tries his hand at a detective noir. Pynchon’s fiction has always been informed by genre fiction, […]

The last few decades have seen an explosion of autobiography and memoir in the comics world. High profile works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persopolis have drawn mainstream attention, and publishers Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly have made it their mission to showcase work that is a conscious antithesis to the fantasy and […]

A biography of a self-mythologized character like Tom Waits is a daunting task. The intertwined aspects of his art and public persona can’t be easily pried apart, and part of the attraction such a figure has is precisely that mystique. Former MOJO editor Barney Hoskyns makes a valiant, well-researched attempt, despite the handicap of being […]

There have already been two book compilations from Found magazine, and editor Davy Rothbart is constantly on the road with his crew, reading and performing everywhere from major TV talk shows to little out-of-the-way places. He’s also an acclaimed short story writer, so it was only a matter of time until he merged the concept […]

In the early ?80s, the subgenre of cyberpunk science fiction emerged as an unwieldy hybrid of avant-garde experimentalism and pulp fiction aiming to shake up a parochial literature of the future that seemed mired in conservative clichés of the past. A small circle of friends — William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley and Bruce Sterling […]

Girl on the Fridge. Etgar Keret (Farrar Straus Giroux). Israeli writer Keret writes concise stories that are very weird and very short (most less than four pages). Though his stories deal with heavy subject matter, often inspired by his stint in the Israeli army, Keret has a light, even comic touch. His seemingly off hand […]

In 1978, a little known cartoonist named Art Spiegelman published a collection of his best short strips up to that point, many of which appeared in various obscure underground comics throughout the 1970s. Breakdowns had very limited distribution, and was a commercial anomaly — there was no market for such books at the time. (Will […]

Several years ago, Chuck Klosterman rose to prominence as the author of an amusing, if sometimes tendentious memoir called Fargo Rock City. In it, he described growing up as a teenage metalhead in rural North Dakota, and trained his sharp critical mind to extolling the virtues of the sometimes despised subgenre of ’80s hair metal, […]