Volume I, Issue 18
October 6 - October 13, 1997

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Yayayayayaya
Author Rebecca Wells is in town in Knoxville, Tennessee to read from her popular novel, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and Tracy Jones discovers how it inspired a local cult of fans. [2]
Tracy Jones

Hard Times. Fragile Lives
Katherine L. Hester's Eggs for Young America is an impressive debut from a new writer for the New South. [3]
Leonard Gill

Once Upon a Midnight Dreary...
October Fool's Day? [4]
John Paul Brophy

History for the Rest of Us
Book review. [5]
Blake de Pastino

No Fear Of Flying
Henry Kisor has written a beautiful first-person account of a deaf man learning to fly. [6]
Gregory McNamee

F-Stop Shopping
Connections between the art and fashion worlds are explored in a thoroughly pictorial manner in Fashion Photography of the Nineties. [7]
James DiGiovanna

Live and In Person!
A roundup of recent author booksigning and appearances in Central Texas, including Worldcon, Texas Folklife Resources, Katherine Hester, and others. [8]
Adrienne Martini, Claiborne K.H. Smith, Jeremy Reed, Monica L. Piņon, and Sarah Hepola

Speed Reader
The Chile Chronicles; I Am the Most Interesting Book of All; When Work Disappears; Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man. [9]
Benny Villalobos, Blake de Pastino, Tracy L. Cooley and Jessica English

The House That Jan Built
Count 'em...56 masterpieces of Western painting in an enchanted cottage that pops up out of a cool new book. [10]
James DiGiovanna

Now What?
Love to read? Need some clever ideas? Our library of resources and staff picks are guaranteed to turn on plenty of mental light bulbs via your electrified eye sockets. [11]

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Talk Back
Our online BBS is just like the Algonquin Round Table, only electronic, sober, and without all the famous people.

This one looks a tad more depressing. Eggs for Young Americans, by Katherine L. Hester, documents the lives of a variety of fictional Southern characters who have no sense of tradition, the vaguest sense of connection with others, and a deep, unexplored rift between their dreams and their realities. You can tell Hester isn't the bubblegum type; I don't expect we'll be hearing any "yaya"s out of her anytime soon, either.

Now here's an oddity: a merging of Edgar Allen Poe's playful poem The Raven with a homeowner's drowsy torment at the hands of some neighborhood pranksters. It's not exactly what I'd call an "article," but I had to include it anyway, because I love Poe.

And speaking of writers with distinctive voices, this review of Studs Terkel's My American Century looks promising. The travelling interviewer, a champion of oral history who explored the "real America" with his own particular sensibility, has collected 50 of his best interviews into one broadly appealing chunk o' cultural anthropology.

What else, what else? Let's see... Got a fear of flying? Flight of the Gin Fizz just might help you get over that one. If author Henry Kisor can face down his male menopause by learning to fly despite his deafness, surely you can tolerate a little turbulence... And fans of fashion photography and strung-out junkies alike will want to flip through Fashion: Photography of the Nineties, which contrasts postmodern "classic" shutterbugging with the grunge aesthetic championed by Larry Clark.

Also check out reviews of Jan Pienowski's Pop-Up, a writer's "deflowring" at a sci-fi convention, and a vast array of books in our regular "Speed Reader" column. Good stuff. And don't forget: Yayayayayayayaya!

The New MeX-Files
Bigfoots, UFOs and Chupacabras. Oh, my! [08-11-97]
Devin D. O'Leary

Speed Reader
Reviews of Few and Far Between, Exile, Drown, and Ripening. [07-21-97]