Cary Barbor
360 Staff Pick: Blame
This gorgeously written novel tracks young history professor Patsy MacLemoore through her alcoholic blackouts, vehicular homicide, prison sentence, and rehabilitation. Don’t let the grim subject matter turn you away. The story’s exploration of responsibility, punishment, and the ways our self-perceptions determine our behavior is authentic and searing.
360 Staff Pick: Big Fan
Big Fan follows a guy (Patton Oswalt) who lives to watch the New York Giants and then bloviate on sports-talk radio. But it’s not a football movie — it’s a fascinating exploration of fandom: what we get from worshiping public figures and what happens when we glimpse their feet of clay.
Echoes of Gekko
The sequel to Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street is set to be released this spring, and Michael Douglas is back as the deliciously unctuous Gordon Gekko. [Update – 3/11: The film’s release date has been pushed back to September.] My favorite part of the trailer (posted below) is when a prison guard, returning Gekko’s […]
Lessons from the Master
Last week, Studio 360 revisited a lively conversation with Marlon James — his novel The Book of Night Women is just out in paperback. All the main characters in the novel are women, and they’re rendered vibrantly. But it seems he didn’t always have that talent. In the interview, James tells Kurt that after he […]
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360 Staff Pick: Little Bee
A vacationing British couple ventures outside the walls of their luxury resort. There, on a Nigerian beach, they run into Little Bee, a young girl fleeing a gang of brutal soldiers. The fallout of that encounter fuels the remainder of the novel. Readers will recognize their own human nature, for good or ill, in the […]
Playing With Our Food
We got nearly 200 great entries to our redesign Valentine challenge. And on last week’s show, Elizabeth Gilbert picked the winning entry: a bouquet of rolled bacon strips that look like roses (only yummier!) by Sarah Tisdale. As Gilbert said so aptly, ‘Nothing can compete with a bacon bouquet.’ It made me wonder why we […]