The nearly forgotten early comic-book artist Fletcher Hanks is rescued from obscurity with I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets (Fantagraphics), which collects 15 of the stories he wrote and illustrated during …
MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and novelist Jonathan Lethem ignores the boundary between literary fiction and “lower” pop-culture or genre work, drawing inspiration from Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, and comics. Lethem …
When Donald Westlake invented Parker, the iron-cold thief protagonist of the series Westlake writes under the pen name Richard Stark, he didn’t know that Parker would be one of the …
Crime novelist Donald Westlake is a man of many aliases—Samuel Holt, Tucker Coe, Curt Clark, pseudonyms picked up over the course of 100-odd published books—but two names stand out, his …
Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft died in poverty in 1937, mostly unknown and treated with derision by the reputable literary world, to the degree that it acknowledged him at all. But …
Originally published in The Rake’s “Broken Clock” arts & entertainment calendar listings, July 2004 issue. Although the wildly prolific P.G. Wodehouse turned out almost a hundred novels in his lifetime, the world …
This interview was published in The Rake‘s July 2004 issue, as part of the magazine’s Broken Clock arts calendar. I expanded it in April 2025 with extra material that was …
Originally published in The Rake’s “Broken Clock” arts & entertainment calendar listings, January 2004 issue. The history of the 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition, which first revealed much of the …
Tolkien fans around the world are counting down to Dec. 17, when at long last we’ll know the answer to a hugely important question — whether the final film in …
Originally published in The Rake’s “Broken Clock” arts & entertainment calendar listings, October 2003 issue. Most of Jonathan Lethem’s early writing career consisted of science fiction novels that leaned toward the Philip …