If Echo of the Boom is representative of the hysterical-realist novel of today, the main quality that differentiates it from its forebears is its treatment of humor.

Orange County reacts to Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, and its own history of trauma.

In his most recent book, one of America’s most important novelists experiments again, and this time, loses the thread.

Kathleen Alcott’s debut is a lyrical, heartfelt novel about the way people try to hold onto things that are transient by nature.

Though the characters that Woodrell has created are often strange, violent, even grotesque, they are always recognizably human.

Peter Orner’s new novel is an album of snapshots, capturing the dreams and disappointments of a middle-class Jewish family in Chicago.

Occupy San Francisco, in its own words: eight people in Justin Herman Plaza on why they’re there, and what the movement is about.

Ozarks author Daniel Woodrell writes soaring, lyrical crime fiction that recalls Faulkner as much as Chandler. Our conversation with the author of Winter’s Bone and the new story collection, The Outlaw Album.

The Scanners Project is a temporary bookstore meets art installation, a showcase of the tactile pleasures of physicality of books.

A new monthly salon at Dog Eared Books, led by SF author Peter Orner, digs deep into the neglected books re-published in the NYRB Classics collection.

To say this was a lively debate would be stretching it, but it was encouraging to see the candidates in agreement on the importance of the arts.

Our conversation with Alix Lambert: journalist, television screenwriter, documentarian, playwright, and photographer.

Art and its representation of crime are a big part of Alix Lambert’s innovative book of interviews with actors, directors, writers, convicts, cops, and gangsters.

If there was biting satire at the heart of Donald: A Novel, then maybe a dignified Donald Rumsfeld would be a character worth putting up with.

From straightforward explorations to experimental odysseys, Percival Everett captures the muddled idea of the current American experience.

From McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series, Underground America collects firsthand accounts from immigrants who have come in pursuit of a dream and found a complex, disturbing reality.

The Creosote Journal’s Zach Vasquez talks with Michael Krasny, host of KQED’s morning talk show Forum, about his new book.

Percival Everett’s picaresque novel suggests that people only get a true sense of their character when they are thrown head-first into drama.

Michael Krasny’s Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest adds a defense of doubt to the debate between religion and atheism.

The anarchist, queer, “Neolithic conservative” man of letters—Paul Goodman—would have turned 100 this year.