July 28 - August 4, 1997

Weekly Wire Xtra
We're christening our new Xtra section with an essay by poet Martin Espada, who learned the hard way that not All Things are Considered in the halls of National Public Radio.

Right Place, Wrong Time
Age is wasted on the young in novelist Peter Rock's first effort. [2]
Richard Siken

Honorable Mentioning
One Haitian scholar makes a big noise over the langauge of silence. [3]
Kent Anderson

Comfortably Numb
A feature review of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's latest novel. [4]
Jessica English

Elvis Lives!
Reviews of detective novels by Robert Crais (Indigo Slam), James Lee Burke (Cimarron Rose), as well as Bradley Denton's Lunatics and Michele Zackheim's Violette's Embrace. [5]
reviews by Mike Shea, Virginia B. Wood, Adrienne Martini, and Anna Hanks

Print Is Dead
Is the Internet enhancing literature or executing it? [6]
Devin D. O'Leary

The King Revisited
Everything you ever wanted to know about Elvis Presley. [7]
Dave McElfresh

Media Mix
A look into the Blind Spot--plus, Bero Gallery hosts a poetry fest! [8]

Speed Reader
Quick reviews of some juicy reads hitting bookstores now. [9]

Culture Shock
A look at the local and national art scene. [10]
Blake de Pastino

Now What?
A Web link page chock full of resources, recommendations, and staff picks pertaining to the subject of this section. [11]

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

At Home In The World
A look at several recent works by poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder. [06-20-97]
Gregory McNamee

Daddy Dearest
Two daughters look at their less-than-stellar fathers in these recent books. [06-13-97]
Margaret Regan

Suprisingly enough, the first review I read focused on those very same dust jackets that had confused me earlier. The writer said he couldn't accept the insights of Peter Rock's This is the Place, about a 60-year-old man's love for a 19-year-old Mormon woman, when the author's barely 30-year-old mug kept staring him in the face. Maybe it's time for dust jackets to return to their job of stopping dust. They don't seem to be very good at P.R.

So then I read reviews of the following books, which must have had less offensive dust jackets because nobody mentioned them.

• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Ralph Trouillat

• The Inner Elvis by Peter Whitmer

• Women with Men by Richard Ford

• Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

• In Awe by Scott Heim

• Loving Wanda Beaver by Allison Baker

• Leave It to Me by Bharati Mukherjee

• several detective novels

That didn't help -- I was left as indecisive as before. What's wrong with me? An article about literary web sites (which, as far as I can tell, have never had dust jackets) only enhanced my confusion. Another article about Blind Spot magazine didn't draw me in either, probably because the photography-based magazine started to sound like one big dust jacket.

Finally, I found a special web location where my reading hunger could be sated. Weekly Wire's human editors created this place called "Xtra" and it's no dust jacket, let me tell you. It currently has an essay by Martin Espada, a former NPR poet who found himself censored when he chose the wrong subject matter for one of his pieces. Maybe they'll change their show to Not All Things Considered now. I don't know. But I do know one thing: after reading Espada's poems, I'm not hungry anymore. Mmm.