The Dude Koans

January 18: “Koans are Zen stories that only make sense if you can see that life and reality are different from your opinions about them.”  

Mississippi Dreaming

January 17: “The Mississippi was my best invention; a dream that was always there, like a big friendly room with an open door into which I could wander at will.”  

Brown Dog

The adventures of Jim Harrison’s “wonderful backwoods nitwit” are collected in one rollicking set of linked tales.  

Endangered Africa

January 16: “[M]odern humans consume disproportionately more resources than other vertebrates, including humans who had simpler lifestyles.”  

Black Music

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) “wrote with ecstasy—highly informed and intricate—about ecstatically complex music”, says Richard Brody of this raucous collection of essays on modern jazz giants (Coltrane, Monk, Sun Ra and more) and their sonic...