AltWeeklies Wire
Atlanta's Lost Boys, Nearly Four Years Laternew
As Mark Bixler tells it in his new book, The Lost Boys of Sudan, the story most of us have heard is true for some of the Lost Boys. For many of them it is not, but it's still the story they tell, having learned (or been coached) that Americans would only help them if their story was simple, dramatic and morally unambiguous.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
03-10-2005 |
Author Profiles & Interviews
Novel Has Deep and Twisted Centernew
After a 20-year absence, Peter Rushforth has finally given us his second novel, Pinkerton's Sister. (His first was Kindergarten. Think Hansel and Gretel meet the Holocaust.) It's set in fin-de-siecle (Alice likes French, too) New York City, and a plot summary wouldn't tell you a damn thing about it.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
03-03-2005 |
Fiction
Author Explains Why 'Down Low' Gets the Blamenew
With all the ways in which lovers cheat on one another, all the paths by which HIV can be spread, and with such a dearth of actual evidence -- anecdotal, clinical, statistical or otherwise -- why did "the DL" get the blame?
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
02-25-2005 |
Nonfiction
Oracles of Things Pastnew
Author Jonathan Odell takes The View from Delphi beyond the typical indictment of segregation's moral absurdity to the historical absurdity of thinking you could ever succeed in keeping people apart.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
02-17-2005 |
Fiction
Author Holds at Arm's Length the Actual Worldnew
The story is about how we make and transform the meaning of our lives. The protagonist, an alt-weekly rock critic, knows the difference between what happens and what stories we tell about it, but only as cold theory, shadows of the real.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
02-10-2005 |
Fiction
Antiheroes Are Despicable But Endearingnew
Ronald Everett Capps has created a difficult duo of despicable and -- damn it all, but it's true -- endearing antiheroes in Off Magazine Street, the story of two lifelong friends and the daughter of their personal big easy.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
12-09-2004 |
Fiction
Poster Book Offers Pages of Drool-Inducing Eye Candynew
Just when the Man seems to nip at the heels of every subculture, and MTV has spit-combed rock's errant cowlick, along comes Art of Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion, promising that the working men and women of graphic design are still keeping rock real.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Felicia Feaster |
12-02-2004 |
Nonfiction
The Low-Carb Soulnew
What would happen if science and religion were to be boiled together in a beaker, then centrifuged, amalgamated, shaken and stirred into a slurry of superstitions, unwarranted presuppositions and outright alchemical quackery?
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
11-24-2004 |
Fiction
Tags: Len Fisher, Weighing the Soul
Wild Riffing Style Leads to Modestly Noble Visionnew
Inman Majors' crazy Southern comedy, Wonderdog, finds the former alter-Opie child star in a world of bad actors: clumsy political players, competitive romantic ritualists and caricatures of masculinity. And the hell of it is that they all seem to be more comfortable in their skins than he is.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
11-18-2004 |
Fiction
Tags: Inman Majors, Wonderdog
Author Has Constructed an Entire Teleology of Turdsnew
Obenzinger has constructed an entire teleology of turds, a sacred scatology of sphincters complete with neo-cannibal rites and the saintly ablutions of Our Lady of Shit, who cleanses the public toilets of the world.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
11-11-2004 |
Fiction
Tags: A*hole, Hilton Obenzinger
Author Still Sadistic, Cantankerous and Outrageously Funnynew
Burroughs grew up gay in rural Massachusetts, the son of a depressed mother and a victim of a crackpot psychiatrist and his pedophile son. Now a recovering alcoholic, he works in a successful but soul-stripping career in advertising, with a cleaning lady who scammed him out of $12,000.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
10-21-2004 |
Nonfiction
Journalist Has Become One of the Masters of True Crime Reportingnew
Sager employs what he refers to as "the precarious practice of New Journalism": unapologetically subjective and relying on many of the techniques of fiction writers to reconstruct events and get inside his subjects' heads.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
10-14-2004 |
Nonfiction
Postmodern Metaphysical Novel Brings Together Fin de Siècle Figuresnew
The characters in this novel come to Africa during a time of colonial retreat to impose their own philosophies on the African jungle's "darkness" (an idea author Norman Lock mercilessly slices and dices with his deconstructive Ginsu).
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
10-07-2004 |
Fiction
Book Whispers the Ancient Continuities of Faith and Culturenew
For Southern fiction, these are familiar stories, tragic and sublime, with an unusual cast of characters. For Jewish fiction, these are familiar characters in unaccustomed tales.
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
09-30-2004 |
Fiction
New Book Examines Classic Rock Songs of the Southnew
Kemp sees the history of Southern rock as, in part, a program of recovery for young white Southerners forced to confront their ancestral guilt: the ashamed melancholy of the Macon-based Allman Brothers Band, the anger of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the intellectual distance of Athens band R.E.M., and the acceptance and final transcendence of the Drive-By Truckers as they sang, "Proud of the glory, stare down the shame/Duality of the Southern thing."
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) |
Thomas Bell |
09-09-2004 |
Nonfiction
