Metro Pulse

Bestselling author Terry Brooks has forged a long career writing giant books about epic fantasy worlds, and Charles Maldonado pops in for a visit. Full story »

Does Haruki Murakami’s popularity derive from the ubiquity of American culture? Perhaps no other Japanese author has attained such a global following, with translations in over 40 languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese. The author’s new memoir, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, suggests that Murakami’s worldwide success has been enabled by his affinity for American iconography. Full story »

Pulp: Historian Jacques Barzun once observed “that a good deal of [20th-century] art has been instructional, the artist-pedagogue flogging the dead philistine.” That remark could serve as epigram to the essays and music Paul D. Miller has collected in Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Full story »

Pulp: After producing a subset of novels exploring the origins of his Los Angeles detective characters Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, and taking a break from those characters with a stand-alone novel (2006’s The Two Minute Rule), Robert Crais returns to the Cole/Pike franchise with a renewed sense of purpose. Full story »

For all its cultural familiarity, there’s never been a full, high literary telling of the story of the Trojan War. Some people may not think an ongoing comics series is an appropriate form for such an epic undertaking, but those are people who haven’t read Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze. Full story »

Sometimes we have a writer who is so good and so reliable that we forget exactly how amazing his prose can be. Perhaps he makes the bestseller lists, but rarely peaks at number one; or she never goes out of print, but the bookstore doesn’t carry those crucial first novels because they’re 20 years old. Then that writer crests with a new book that’s so clearly in his wheelhouse that you physically crave breaking out his old titles and letting his words wash over your brain. One such writer is James Lee Burke. Full story »

John Connolly is easily one of the finest practitioners of the supernatural-tinged mystery story, with a series of books featuring the literally and metaphorically haunted P.I. Charlie Parker. Two of the supporting characters in that series now have a book of their own, The Reapers, and though Parker makes an appearance, actual ghosts do not. Full story »

Despite its mere 294 pages, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project appears to contain three times that. Launched from a historical moment in 1908, the novel provokes a dozen voices spanning a century and two continents. Additionally, The Lazarus Project is not confined to text alone, but incorporates historical and contemporary photographs in its chronicle of resurrection. Full story »

Charles Maldonado goes where even angels fear to tread (angels over 17, at any rate)—the Young Adult section of a local bookstore. There, Charles considers some current examples of the genre, with input from his... younger self? We're starting to worry about that boy... Full story »

A few locals take the time to give us their insiders' short-lists on the topics they know best. Full story »

It's our annual summer reading issue: We've surveyed the hippest of Knoxville's (elusive) hiperati, and asked them what books are on their must-read list this year at the beach or on the lake or in the lawn chair. Be sure to take notes; there'll be a test next week. Full story »

Near the end of All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo, author and journalist Bryan Mealer describes breakfast in a train’s dining carriage as “one of my happiest moments. Because it was the first time out on the road where, for a brief moment, I felt I could’ve been anywhere in the world.” It’s a curious observation, one that unintentionally exposes the divide between travel writing and journalism. Travel writing seeks to describe the experience of engaging a unique “somewhere,” whereas journalism’s aim is simply to report it. All Things Fight to Live meanders between these two frames of reference, meanwhile recounting Mealer’s harrowing experiences as a reporter in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Full story »

Crime novels can be travel guides to a sense of place, a way to experience both the familiar and the unfamiliar through a grimy lens that just happens to rack its focus from the gutter. A city like Dublin, Ireland, trapped forever by its storied past yet thriving in its “Celtic Tiger” present of urban renewal and technology, is an ideal matte painting upon which to splatter a little blood. Full story »

In the early 1980s, Andrew Holleran wrote a column called New York Notebook for the magazine Christopher Street. His subject, at first, was gay New York. By 1982, when the AIDS crisis hit the city, that became his subject—the disease, the fear, the sudden deflation and dissipation of an entire community. Full story »

There’s a timely relevance to Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy’s 1939 memoir A Journey Round My Skull. TV’s medical mysteries have become our classical drama, their sequence of gore, gadgetry, and unconcealed patient disregard recalling Aristotelian unities. In Round My Skull, that aesthetic is turned on its head, the story unfolding entirely from the patient’s perspective and fully absent of present-day medical technology. Full story »