// Category Archive for: Books

Book Review: A Christmas Story: Behind The Scenes Of A Holiday Classic

By Chelsea Spear

A Christmas Story seems like one of those films that was always part of our cultural heritage. Every Christmas, TBS broadcasts it in a 24-hour loop, phrases like “you’ll shoot your eye out” have entered the lexicon, and tchotchkes like the infamous leg lamp sell in large quantities online. Because of the film’s ubiquity, viewers can take for granted what went into getting it made. Writer Caseen Gaines (with the assistance of Jean Shepherd scholar Eugene P. Bergman and actor Wil Wheaton) lifts the curtain on the making of this beloved feature with the book A Christmas Story: Behind the Scenes of a Holiday Classic.

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Book Review: Gary Lucas, Touched By Grace: My Time With Jeff Buckley

By J Howell

Gary Lucas duly notes early on in Touched By Grace that the book is neither a biography of Jeff Buckley nor Lucas himself. It is, however, a remarkable peek from Lucas’s perspective of a brief, tumultuous period in the author’s life, a time of promise and disappointment on a scale that seems overwhelming in retrospect. While the gravitas of the situation may not be readily apparent to non- (or even casual) fans of Buckley or Lucas, considering the lasting impact Grace has made on so many lives, Touched By Grace is an inside look at, frankly, kind of a big deal. Or at least a really big part of a big deal.

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Assemblog: October 25, 2013

Here Comes The Devil

New this week on Popshifter: Lisa enthuses over the new horror anthology Comfort Foods from the Nashville Writers Group; Jeff suggests five Italian horror movies that you may not have known about and wraps himself up in Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours; Melissa argues that sitars and flutes are more influential than previously thought in her review of The Dawn of Psychedelia and is disappointed in the new Fratellis album, We Need Medicine.

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Book Review: Comfort Foods: This Ain’t Your Momma’s Cooking!

By Lisa Anderson

October is here! And just in time for Halloween, the Nashville Writer’s Group presents Comfort Foods, a horror anthology edited by Nashville author Nikki Nelson-Hicks. The collection includes 13 short stories from local writers, many of which have distinctly Southern, if not uniquely Nashville, flavor to them. Some of these tales offer new takes on classic chills such as ghosts or zombies, and others invent entirely new nightmares for the reader.

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Book Review: Rookie Yearbook Two

By Chelsea Spear

If ever there was a website that required a print counterpart, that website would be Rookie. The smart, bracingly honest site founded by wunderkind Tavi Gevinson has in part made its name on its gorgeous photography, endearing handwritten content, kaleidoscopic collages, and lovingly curated vintage images.

Holding Rookie Yearbook Two between the palms of your hands and idly flipping through its pages is a satisfying experience. The opening and closing papers contain autographs from some of Rookie’s bold-faced friends and contributors, like comedienne Julie Klausner, photographer Autumn de Wilde, and punk rock renaissance woman Carrie Brownstein; the book is printed on heavy matte-finish vellum paper, and the shifting, girly page backgrounds of quilts and textiles gives the book an inviting appearance. Tavi and her colleagues even included some pages to rip out, like a mini-tarot deck of photos from a photo shoot and a foldout of stickers for a build-your-own-shrine feature.

Writing this much about the appearance of a book—down to the card stock pages on which it was printed—might sound a note of foreboding that the images might outshine the words. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Rookie’s graphic design, online and in print, will enchant readers, the content will engage them past the first glimmers of glamour.

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Forget About Shark Week: It’s Shark Month with the August Kickstarter for Frenzy, An Illustrated Prose Novel

By Less Lee Moore

Artwork © Chandra Free, 2013

If you prefer your sharks to be more like Jaws than Sharknado, here’s something you can really sink your multiple rows of teeth into: Frenzy, where the sharks are the stars, and the humans are the threat!

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Book Review: Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood, By Curtis Harrington

By Chelsea Spear

Before Guy Maddin, there was Curtis Harrington. Like Maddin, Harrington made byzantine features that served as a love letter to early cinema at a time when it was mildly unfashionable to do so. He frequently cast dwarf actors and other nontraditional talents alongside the kinds of grandes dames that Hollywood forgot. His films incorporated outmoded narrative and technical elements that, when used well, could hypnotize audiences. Unlike Maddin, who is recognized by his peers as a true visionary, Harrington had worked his way through the studios during the New Hollywood era, when the kind of work he was doing was on its way out, and he never got the recognition he quite deserved.

Harrington’s posthumously published memoir Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood reads a bit like history as told from the perspective of someone who had the talent and drive but not the aesthetic. Though Harrington would hate the phrase “lovable loser,” his point of view and self-deprecating sense of humor mitigate any pity one might feel towards his series of near misses.

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Blu-Ray Review: Life Of Pi

By Less Lee Moore

TM and © 2011 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved. Not for sale or duplication.

Those who read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi towards the beginning of the last decade probably wondered how such a fantastic tale could ever be filmed. There were also those who, upon hearing that Ang Lee was tackling a film version of Life of Pi, felt elated and relieved that someone with such talent and commitment to a story was the one chosen.

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Assemblog: February 22, 2013

Inside Llewyn Davis

New this week on Popshifter: Paul takes Men’s Rights Advocates to task in his article on Women in Gaming and tells tales of pro wrestling redemptions; Chelsea loves Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s first full-length album RiPLEY PINE; I fawn over new releases from Parenthetical Girls, Dawn McCarthy & Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Iceage, share the latest from Big Black Delta, and review French Horn Rebellion’s newest EP Love Is Dangerous; and Hanna admires both the humor and scientific methods found in The Marriage of True Minds from Matmos.

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Best Of 2012: Chelsea Spear

Say you’re a rock critic and the calendar has dwindled to a single page. You’re expected to write a year-in-review column, but your artistic heroes have disappointed you and none of the year’s new releases have galvanized you the way you’d hoped. What do you do? You reach into your back pages to look at some forgotten favorites and things that got away from you the first time around. In writing about these forgotten favorites, maybe you can introduce your readers to something new as well.

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