AltWeeklies Wire
Adult Fantasy Author Lev Grossman on His Work, Harry Potter and Evelyn Waughnew

No, it's not the Harry Potter series—it's The Magicians by Lev Grossman, an adult take on the Hogwarts mythos that took the fantasy subgenre by storm in 2009 (and which is decidedly not for kids).
INDY Week |
Gerry Canavan |
08-24-2011 |
Author Profiles & Interviews
William Gibson Discusses Memory, Twitter and His Latest Novelnew

Gibson, whose early works -- especially his 1984 debut, Neuromancer -- epitomized cyberpunk literature, is a writer who has seen his visions become unremarkable reality.
INDY Week |
Gerry Canavan |
09-20-2010 |
Author Profiles & Interviews
Tags: William Gibson
New Anthology 'Love Is a Four-Letter Word' Examines Relief, Regret and Repentancenew
This anthology of "true stories of breakups, bad relationships and broken hearts" included stories from well-known writers like Junot Diaz, Gary Shteyngart, George Singleton, Lynda Barry and well-linked lit blogger Maud Newton. The book's epigraph, from Oscar Wilde, captures the complexities of the book's tone nicely; the heart, the Irish satirist tells us, was made to be broken.
INDY Week |
Gerry Canavan |
08-21-2009 |
Nonfiction
Suzanne Simons Gives Us a New -- and Timely -- Biography of the Man Behind Blackwaternew
Heroic in Master of War's opening pages, Simons ends her portrait with Erik Prince sputtering in impotent rage against a media he believes has unfairly maligned his company.
INDY Week |
Gerry Canavan |
08-14-2009 |
Nonfiction
Man and Myth: The Flood of Lincoln Books Goes Onnew
The 11 essays Eric Foner has gathered attempt to wrestle from the mists of history and hagiography a balanced picture of the man who is almost certainly America's most sacred martyr: a sad-eyed, dour man in a stovepipe hat and beard that every schoolchild knows saved the country a long time ago.
INDY Week |
Gerry Canavan |
02-05-2009 |
Nonfiction
'The World Without Us' Offers the Anti-Apocolypsenew
This was not the first time Alan Weisman had examined nature's resilience in the absence, nor near-absence, of humans.
INDY Week |
Gerry Canavan |
09-11-2008 |
Nonfiction
Lewis Shiner's Novel of the Destruction of Haytinew
There are secrets upon secrets in Black & White, sins upon sins, but they all revolve around a single, penetrating absence: Hayti, the African-American community gutted by the construction of the Durham Freeway 40 years ago.
'Mobility Without Mayhem' Explores Drivingnew
Understanding the primacy of the automobile in American life.
INDY Week |
Gerry Canavan |
03-20-2008 |
Nonfiction
Lamenting the Fading of Black Historynew
One of the more startling revelations of Charles Cobb Jr.'s On the Road to Freedom, out last month from Algonquin Books, is just how rapidly the physical history of the Civil Rights movement is withering before our eyes.
INDY Week |
Gerry Canavan |
02-14-2008 |
Nonfiction
'No Easy Victories' Documents Struggles for African Liberationnew
The book is a veritable encyclopedia of the triumphs and tragedies of the international movements for African liberation that attracted Americans from the civil rights, feminist and antiwar movements throughout the 1960s and '70s and made its biggest impact in the ultimately successful anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and '80s.
INDY Week |
Gerry Canavan |
01-24-2008 |
Author Profiles & Interviews