DC's All-Star Western #4: Exclusive Comic Preview

By Garrett Martin at 1:30 PM on December 22, 2011

Well before Batman, notorious bounty hunter Jonah Hex tussled with evil in Gotham. Paste has an exclusive four-page preview of DC's All-Star Western #4, which continues the tale next Wednesday.  read more

Frankenstein Issue 4: Exclusive Preview

By Garrett Martin at 4:05 PM on December 9, 2011

"It's a big fun science-fiction adventure with lots of monsters killing other monsters," says Frankenstein writer Jeff Lemire. Paste has an exclusive look at the first four pages from Franktenstein Agent of S.H.A.D.E. from DC Comics.  read more

The New DC 52: A Look At All 52 First Issues

By Garrett Martin, Sean Edgar and David Raposa at 4:49 PM on November 16, 2011

DC Comics released the first issues of 52 new series during a relaunch of their entire line of superhero comics. Paste comic reviewers read every issue and now reviewed the entire line-up week by week.  read more

Elizabeth and Hazel: A Story of Racial Integration

By Stephen M. Deusner at 5:08 PM on October 31, 2011

David Margolick doesn’t remember the first time he saw the historic photograph that inspired his new book, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women from Little Rock, but it left an enormous impression on him.  read more

The Gospel of Craig Thompson: Blankets Author's Epic Adventure

By Michael Tedder at 3:35 PM on September 26, 2011

Craig Thompson was 28 years old when he released Blankets, a sweet and sad autobiographical account of the writer/artist reconciling his small-town fundamentalist Christian upbringing with falling in love for the first time.  read more

Tom Carson: Pam-American

By Stephen M. Deusner at 8:50 AM on August 18, 2011

Poor young Pamela Buchanan is more a prop than a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel The Great Gatsby, trotted out by her parents like a particularly rare Tiffany lamp or a yellow Rolls-Royce. She serves as a stark reminder of the stakes of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s infidelities, at least as seen through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway....  read more

Paste mPlayer Issue #3

By Josh Jackson at 2:06 PM on July 12, 2011

This week's issue features one of our favorite bands, My Morning Jacket. Paste editor-at-large Jay Sweet has stalked their progress so closely these last seven years that we’re thankful Jim James hasn’t tried to get a restraining order. In a 4,500-word story that spans 13 encounters in five cities, Sweet was the fly on the MMJ wall as the band worked its way up through the ranks.  read more

Our Favorite Posters from the Indie Rock Poster Book

By Laura Medina at 3:10 PM on May 13, 2011

“I see where the inspiration came from,” someone might say squinting at a smudge of brown paint on a canvas in a brightly-lit gallery. But it’s often difficult to see where an artist is coming from when the only explanation is a neatly printed card with a singular word or phrase accompanied by a high-price tag....  read more

2010 Person of the Year in Nonfiction: Mark Twain

By Michael Dunaway at 5:25 PM on February 1, 2011

Since the quintessential American author was not himself available for interview, we decided to do the next best thing and talk to Hal Holbrook, the man who's spent as much time as anyone getting inside the author's head.  read more

2010 Person of the Year in Fiction: Jonathan Franzen

By Jennifer Haigh at 11:26 AM on January 20, 2011

Franzen has crafted an eminently accessible, utterly populist work of fiction in which the reading public recognizes itself.  read more

Short Story: Vladimir Volkoff's "The Ways of the Lord"

By John Marson Dunaway at 2:02 PM on November 11, 2010

In September of 2005, Russo-French novelist Vladimir Volkoff died in his sleep in Bourdeilles in southwestern France. Born in 1932 in Paris to White Russians who had fled Communism, Volkoff was passionately devoted to a heroic ideal that demanded selfless service and aristocratic honor. His reputation as a writer rested primarily upon the espionage fiction that propelled him into the French media in the early 1980s (The Turnaround, 1979; The Set-Up, 1982; and his magisterial tetralogy, The Moods of the Sea, 1980). But he was also a man of widely diverse talents and interests: an intelligence officer in the French...  read more

Book Excerpt: Ten Photos from Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae

By Bonnie Stiernberg at 8:30 AM on October 25, 2010

The book, which includes photos of Marley, Peter Tosh and George Harrison, also has a foreword written by Cameron Crowe...  read more

Best of What's Next: Author Julie Orringer

By Nick Marino at 12:00 PM on October 19, 2010

HOMETOWN: Brooklyn, N.Y. BOOK: The Invisible Bridge FOR FANS OF: Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, The Believer...  read more

Best of What's Next: Author Holly Goddard Jones

By Ani Vrabel at 12:00 PM on October 14, 2010

HOMETOWN: Russellville, Ky. BOOK: Girl Trouble FOR FANS OF: Harper Lee, Heidi Julavits, Claire Messud In Holly Goddard Jones’ short-story collection Girl Trouble, marriages crumble, probable murderers walk free and people toy with and discard each other’s feelings like trinkets from a cereal box. In artful but unpretentious prose, the 30-year-old author explores the simultaneous depths and limitations of being human, showing the many sides of what usually appear to be black-and-white issues....  read more

Best of What's Next: Poetry Revival Comes Alive

By Jennifer Ross at 11:00 AM on October 12, 2010

HOMETOWNS: Long Beach, Calif.; Portland; Seattle BOOKS: Over the Anvil We Stretch (Anis Mojgani), Live for a Living (Buddy Wakefield), Scandalabra (Derrick Brown) FOR FANS OF: A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Saul Williams...  read more

Book Excerpt: Nine Photos From People You'd Like to Know

By Herb Wise at 2:00 PM on October 1, 2010

I love taking pictures. Maybe you can see that in the faces of the people I've captured...  read more

Our Favorite Better Book Titles

By Bonnie Stiernberg at 1:00 PM on October 1, 2010

Sometimes, you need to judge a book by its cover. After all, you’ve got stuff to do, and if it can’t be summarized in 140 characters, it’s probably not worth a read anyway, right? Or something?...  read more

Book Excerpt: A Scissor Sister Writes a Comic About CBGB

By Bonnie Stiernberg at 2:00 PM on September 21, 2010

Ana Matronic is the author of CBGB: The Comic Book...  read more

Mr. Unpopular: Gary Shteyngart

By Mark Krotov at 7:30 AM on July 27, 2010

In his new novel, Gary Shteyngart takes on the big themes--war, tyranny and talking otters...  read more

Book Excerpt: Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America

By Natasha Vargas-Cooper at 10:00 AM on July 23, 2010

This story is a part of our Mad Men Takeover. Season four of the series premieres on AMC this Sunday, July 25. — Below, an excerpt from Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s new Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America. Here, the author sets up the excerpt… Beyond Mad Men’s top-notch writing, complex characters, hypnotic design (really, the fusion of all these elements is the highest caliber of art, and it’s so titillating to witness a renaissance in such an unlikely medium, isn’t it?), there’s an all-engrossing mood that permeates the show. That mixture of anxiety, instability, and tectonic cultural shifts that...  read more