Karen Olsson
By Karen Olsson:
Utopian Aspirations
Utopian Aspirations BY KAREN OLSSON The Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia by William Pfaff Simon and Schuster 368 pages, $27.95 illiam Pfaff hates the sin but loves the sinner. In The Bullet’s Song he condemns twentieth-century Europe’s grim history … Read More
Global VIctorians
Robert Newman should get some credit just for the attempt. In The Fountain at the Center of the World, his third novel, he has written a sweeping and unabashedly political book, as concerned with the effects of trade globalization as … Read More
Writing the Big Picture
People’s Witness: The Journalist in Modern Politics It was with a kind of grossed-out amusement that I read, in a recent edition of The New York Times, that a band of Democratic party stalwarts, led by former Clinton chief of … Read More
Book Review
Unspooling Memory
It is revealed on the first page of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel The Feast of the Goat that Urania Cabral, the bitter, driven Dominican-in-exile whose 1996 return to Santo Domingo forms one strand of this carefully braided book, has little … Read More
The Glen Rose Cycle
Jesus, dinosaurs, and the resurrection of the musical in tourist-happy Somervell County.
David L. Humphrey often seems pleased to find himself wherever he happens to be, and every Saturday in May he finds himself, quite cheerfully, at the Texas Ampitheater in Glen Rose. He is typically equipped with the following: a black … Read More
Every Man a Kingpin
A new method of making methamphetamine is turning run-of-the-mill addicts into drug manufacturers. In North Texas, the kingpins are living out of their cars.
Amphetamine and methamphetamine are simple molecules. Diagrammed on paper, amphetamine looks like a hexagon with a forked tail. Its skeleton is just a ring of six carbon atoms, with two more carbon atoms attached to the ring, and then a … Read More
Who Wants to Be a Legislator?
A look at our newest crop of State Representatives
Our legislators have once again arrived in Austin. They have once again forsaken their comfortable homes in Palestine and Euless and Voss for barren, overpriced Austin apartments, left their friends and family to hang out with the likes of Representatives … Read More
Book Review
The Years With Laura Diaz
The Years with Laura Díaz by Carlos Fuentes A third of the way through Carlos Fuentes’ latest novel, The Years With Laura Díaz, Artemio Cruz shows up. The year is 1932, and Laura Díaz and her lover are at a … Read More