Malcolm Jones

Harvey Pekar, who died Monday at the age of 70, should be the patron saint of soreheads. Even when he got successful he stayed cranky, maybe because being a crank was what made him successful. Not even Pekar was fool enough to fuss with that formula. After the "American Splendor" series of comics came out starting in 1976, he was hailed as the bard of the common man, a sort of genius of ordinariness. He was nothing of the sort.

The blues, like the novel, is always dead or dying, according to someone, somewhere. But somehow, time and again, both these old forms find a way to resurrect themselves. Still, if you were asked to name the best new blues album, would you pin it to Cyndi Lauper?

Extra features on DVDs have become so commonplace that we take them for granted. We shouldn't. Hearing Robert Altman talk about "Gosford Park" thoroughly enriches our understanding, not to mention our enjoyment. But what about the same principle applied to books?

First came the Slow Food movement. Now it's Slow Reading—a trend that encourages considered, leisurely reading over unseemly speed. Easy there, fella.

Ever wonder when the gurglings of a French baby first start to take on a French accent? Linguist Crystal's fascinating book has all the answers.

Is the blues dying? That's the question the Chicago Tribune's Howard Reich put to Lincoln T. Beauchamp Jr., a.k.a. Chicago Beau, a blues musician; radio DJ Steve Cushing; and the author David Whiteis. All of them admitted that this venerable American musical invention, now in its second century, was ailing.

Hank Jones, the jazz pianist nonpareil who died May 16 at 91, was many things. He was the elder brother in a trio of astonishingly talented musicians (the other two: Thad on trumpet and Elvin on drums). He lived long enough to see jazz pass through nearly all of its 20th- and 21st-century permutations and mastered them all.

Larsson was one of those rare writers who could keep you up until 3 a.m. and then make you want to rush home the next night to do it again. Given that there are more than 27 million copies of his books in print, it's worth speculating on how he did it.

I knew time was softening my jaw line, expanding my belt size, and even shaving almost an inch off my height. What I wasn't expecting was that simultaneously, it was surreptitiously fooling with my taste—my artistic taste. And yet there was the evidence, plain as day: all of a sudden, I liked Jimmy Webb.

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a lot of people, including numerous civil-rights leaders and at least one congressman, assumed that a conspiracy lay behind his death.

Turkeys, cardinals, bald eagles—love 'em! It's those darned starling/crow look-alikes—not to mention those maddening finch/robin sound-alikes—that ought to be stuffed.

Is it possible to write a fey novel about the Holocaust? Perhaps, you may be thinking, the better question is, why would anyone want to? But then, you have not read Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil, a strange—and often strangely beguiling—novel that is a story of a novelist trying not so successfully to write a novel about the Holocaust.

The Library of America used to stand for the most canonical of writers. Now, LOA could also mean Losing Our Authors.

Ellison died trying to finish his last book. That shouldn't stop you from reading it.

Why the reclusive author's books never hooked me.

Near the end of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, a psychiatrist pops in to explain serial killer Norman Bates to his captors—and to us, the audience: "I got the whole story—but not from Norman.

Ralph Stanley, now 82, has been singing and playing professionally since the '40s, but the music he performs now is not radically different from what he grew up playing and singing with his brother, Carter, in the Stanley Brothers band.

When was the last time a notable person with lots to hide (obsessive-compulsive disorder, a refusal to bathe, the fact that he wore wigs that didn't fit) insisted that his biographer measure and record every fault with seismographic precision?

You can't say you don't see the trouble coming, not in a novel where the first line is "The cold came late that fall and the songbirds were caught off guard." The narrator is Tassie Keltjin, a Midwestern college student looking for baby-sitting work in December 2001.

The number of books in print in 2008 rose 38 percent from the year before (which itself was up 38 percent from 2006).

Crime fiction may be at the bottom of the literary food chain, but for some A-list writers, noir is the new black.

Which sleuths made the cut? We pick the best detective fiction for your summer reading list.

I spent many days with the writer of Angela's Ashes, and he was one of the greatest men I've ever interviewed.

The IMPAC Dublin literary prize brings attention to unknown writers, but is it enough to help readers cut through the clutter?

If there's anything more insatiable than a vampire, it's the public's appetite for vampire tales. The trick for an author or filmmaker is to vary the formula just enough (teen vampires!) to suck back in those of us who have sworn off vampires (and serial killers) for good.

The history of popular music in the 20th century is old news. It begins, depending on who you believe, with Scott Joplin and ragtime. Or maybe when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band first performed in 1916.

Chaplin stars in the novel 'Sunnyside.' So does Rin Tin Tin. Sometimes fiction is stranger than truth.

Visual acuity is at the heart of "Everlasting Moments," the beautiful new film by Sweden's Jan Troell ("The Emigrants"). Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) is the working-class wife of an abusive drunk.

'Mad Men' is hot. So is Richard Yates. Where are the Cheever believers?

Fifty years ago, Miles Davis recorded 'Kind of Blue.' If you own one jazz album, this is probably the one.