Books | Frontier Psychiatrist

Gods, Devils, and Sorcerers: A Review of William Friedkin, The Friedkin Connection

BY JOHN NICOSIA In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s seminal work on Hollywood in the 1970s, William Friedkin was the closest thing to a villain. According to one producer, Friedkin, the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, “didn’t give a fuck about anybody else that walked the face of the earth.” In...

friedkin

Phreak Out: A Review of Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone

BY JOHN NICOSIA In Sidney Pollock’s 1975 political thriller, Three Days of the Condor, a former AT&T lineman (Robert Redford), breaks into a Bell System building in Manhattan and calls the CIA. Just as the agency thinks it has traced the call, a new location pops up, then another, then another. “He’s tying twenty phones...

explodingthephone

Book Arts in the Digital Age: An Interview with Luke Daly

BY GINA MYERS Even in the age of digital media, many writers, artists, and publishers are still dedicated to book arts, from silkscreening covers, to using letterpress technology, to hand-binding books. In that spirit, Chicago’s Spudnik Press Annex offers a space for writers, bookmakers, artists, students, and others to learn about some of these processes. Founded in 2013,...

Luke Daly

Visible Man: A Review of T Cooper’s Real Man Adventures

BY ANDREW HERTZBERG At the beginning of 2013 I made two literary resolutions. 1. To read 52 books in 52 weeks. 2. To read books written by female, minority, LGBT, or non-American authors. The idea is not only to increase my reading consumption but to expand my literary comfort zone beyond books written by straight white males. So when I read the first...

A Tale For A Tale For the Time Being

BY ANDREW HERTZBERG Hi! My name is Andrew, and I am a time being. I learned what a time being was from Naoko (Nao) Yasutani, a 16 year old Japanese girl whose diary washed up on the shore of a small town outside of Vancouver. It was found by Ruth, who is a character invented...

Russia Is (Not) a Cold, Dead Place: A Review of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived A Girl

BY ANDREW HERTZBERG The difficult thing to remember while reading There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself is that the subtitle is Love Stories. The collection of 17 short stories, recently translated from Russian and culled from 30 years of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s career, feature desperate characters in cramped...

115 Paragraphs: A Review of Matthew Salesses, I’m Not Saying…

BY GINA MYERS In I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, the nameless first-person narrator suddenly becomes a father to his five-year-old son, a previously unknown consequence of a one night stand, after the boy’s mother dies. Through a string of separate but related stories that take place over the course of a year, the narrator struggles in this...

Published February 17, 2013 by Civil Coping Mechanisms Press.

Monster in Love: A Review of Anne Carson’s Red Doc

BY GINA MYERS Throughout her career Anne Carson has published essays, translations, poems, criticism, opera, and prose, though perhaps her most well-known book is a novel-in-verse, Autobiography of Red. Published in 1998, Autobiography of Red was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a National Book Critics Award Finalist. It tells the...

Red Doc> will be published by Alfred A. Knopf on March 11, 2013

Don’t Speak, Tell: Pow! and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

BY ANDREW HERTZBERG Pow! is the most recently translated work by Chinese author and the 2012 Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan (莫言). His works are often compared to Central- and South-American magical realism and weave in the more surrealistic and folkloric aspects of literature into settings and characters based in contemporary reality. His works have also...

Jewish Gender Journey: A Review of Joy Ladin, Through the Door of Life

BY DAN FRIEDMAN Imagine you leave work one semester as a man but when you return to the classroom a few semesters later you are a woman. Imagine trying to smile through this gender transition if you teach at a conservative religious institution where gender roles are clearly delineated. And, just for kicks, imagine what...

Joy Ladin

Other Half: A Review of Christa Parravani’s Her

BY GINA MYERS Statistics show that fifty percent of twins die within two years of each other. Christa Parravani had to face this fact in 2006 at the age of 28 after her identical twin sister Cara died of a heroin overdose. Christa’s harrowing debut Her: A Memoir, which will be published in March, charts her...

Her will be published by Henry Holt & Co. on March 5, 2013

Mind Games: An Interview with Chris Berdik

BY KEITH MEATTO In Act II of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark says: “There’s nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” More than four centuries later, modern science would agree –at least up to a point. In his new book, Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations, author Chris Berdik illustrates how...

Chris Berdik. Mind Over Mind

Page 1 of 712 3 4 5 6 7

© Frontier Psychiatrist