Suzan Sheman

These stories, unlike typical, neatly plotted and contained narratives, are overflowing with crass and sometimes crude encounters, initially shocking, refreshing, and also incredibly funny. 

Stupid Club’s first CD Made to Feel is an eclectic collection of songs inspired by vinyl favorites crisscrossing a seemingly limitless range of genres. Stupid Club strikes a balance between looking back at music and adding an air of knowing sophistication in order to make it their own.

In the early 1930s, shortly after the invention of the portable audio recorder, the Federal Writers’ Project documented the experience of slavery by interviewing those who had lived under it.

Melanie Rae Thon’s masterful collection of short stories, is a testament to the struggling voices of runaways, drug addicts, and alcoholics.

Two books due out this winter combine image and text in ways which enhance both forms of expression—I Could Read the Sky, a novel by Timothy O’Grady with photographs by Steve Pyke, and Photographs and Poems, by Jeanette Montgomery Barron and Jorie Graham.

Habit is low budget and gritty, fitting for its setting in the lower Manhattan bars, tenement apartments, and Italian festivals of summer—you can almost smell the sausages and peppers smoldering.

The characters in Rebecca Brown’s eloquent short story collection What Keeps Me Here(Harper Collins) are predominantly women—women who are strong, who love each other, who make art, and who wait in silent rooms for their lives to change.