Minnesota Reads

When we last saw that saucy Julie Powell, she was a sweaty rosacea mess of marrow-crusted fingernails and damn-near oozing butter from her pores at the finish line of a year-long Julia Child marathon fraught with self flagellation, hard liquor, and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” quotations. Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, is [...]

Bill Scheft doesn't need me to tell you how funny his book is. Larry David has a blurb on the front cover. Larry fucking David (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld). Also, Lewis Black (The Daily Show) weighs in with a blurb on the back. Which makes me wonder if 50-year old white comedians from New York [...]

It’s not a good idea to write a review of a book when your eyes are still wet with the tears it caused you to shed. So I waited an entire day to see if the raw emotion evoked by David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches would abate a little before I told you about this [...]

Whenever I open a book by Carol Shields, I prepare myself to walk into a folksy Midwest version of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood, starring sassy old biddies who turn scrapbooking a full-contact sport. I’m not sure where I got the idea that she writes Hot Flash Fiction, but I’m always wrong, and I’ve never been more [...]

We just wanted to let you know that Rain Taxi’s annual fundraising auction ends tomorrow (Sunday, December 20th). There’s still time to place your bid on some of the awesome stuff up for grabs.

I once read a review of a movie version of Anna Karenina that compared viewing the film to “watching beautiful animals moving behind thickly frosted glass.” At the time I wasn't sure what that meant, but now, after reading Tobias Wolff's In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, I think I have a better [...]

It’s time for Rain Taxi’s annual fundraising auction. Actually it started a few days ago and I totally spaced it. But there’s still time to head on over to the auction and see what’s up for grabs. They’ve got a ton of stuff — first editions, gorgeous broadsides, rare chapbooks, quirky used books, as well [...]

This is probably a pretty severe online faux pas — coming to a Web site invented by one of the more serious Replacements fans in the world to talk about a little book the band inspired, a little book that really doesn’t have much to do with the Replacements at all. Colin Meloy’s greeting-card sized [...]

Near as I can tell, I stopped reading Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao sometime around Tuesday, May 8, 2007. I know this because when I cracked open the book a few weeks ago, a ticket stub for an Elvis Costello concert fell out. I stopped reading because the buzz for [...]

Stark is back from Hell and he’s pissed. After eleven years in Hell, or as he calls it, “Downtown,” where being the only living human to ever enter Hell subjected him to gladiator-style fights with monsters, Stark is out to kill his magic friends, the “Circle,” who sent him Downtown and murdered his girlfriend. Getting [...]

Long ago we called this sort of thing an After School Special — television programs that featured timely topics and life lessons for a school-aged audience. Titles included: “What if I’m Gay?,” “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom,” and “My Dad Lives In A Downtown Motel.” But they were cooled-up with familiar teen faces: The teen [...]

David Sedaris still holds the title of Best Comedy Writer in my mind, but after reading My Horizontal Life, I've decided Chelsea Handler is making a pretty strong bid to be the heir to that throne. In My Horizontal Life, the unapologetically (almost proudly) promiscuous Handler recalls her many one-night stands with a tart, dry [...]

Nick Hornby is at his best when he writes about music. He has that inexplicable ability to convey what music means in a way that seems incredibly personal to him and yet universal at the same time. He’s so good when he writes about music that it often seems like he’s the first one to [...]

Charles Highway is a Rick Ocasek-looking, luggie horking, father-hating-for-unspecified-reasons, asthmatic on the cusp of his 20th birthday, which he is taking, like most things, very seriously. He spends the hour leading up to midnight of the big day, which he refers to as the end of his youth, revisiting his relationship with Rachel. This is [...]

Hello, allow me to introduce our newest MN Reads’ reviewer, LeAnn Suchy. She found MN Reads on twitter (@mnreads) and didn’t believe being a reviewer was as easy as asking. See, it really is that easy! LeAnn’s a librarian from St. Cloud who recently moved to our lovely Twin Cities to take classes at The [...]