cult classics

  • Stay-at-Home Drive-In Movie Madness!!

    After regular movie theaters have suspended operations, many couples and families have rediscovered Drive-In Movie Theaters, where social distancing is a standard feature! My sister is a drive-in movie buff, and so she and her husband love to go to the Blue Fox Drive-In up on Oak Harbor, one of five still running in our… Continue reading

  • 125th Anniversary Series: What We Were Reading in 1891

    2016 marks the 125th anniversary of The Seattle Public Library. After it was adopted as a department of the city in 1890, the Library opened its first reading room in Pioneer Square on April 8, 1891. To honor this milestone, we will be posting a series of articles here about the Library’s history and life in… Continue reading

  • G is for Goodis, Dark Prince of Noir.

    I know – you were thinking G was for Grafton, but as the Kinsey Milhone series already made an appearance in a recent post on the most prolific female detectives, I get to resume my Alphabet of Crime with one of my all time favorites: David Goodis. Close your eyes and think of “Noir.” What do you see, hear, feel?… Continue reading

  • Experiments with Fiction, Part 1

    I recently read a strange little book by Tao Lin, called Eeeee Eee Eeee. It is fiction, a novel of sorts, although its characters are almost uniformly flat and disaffected (including the dolphins and the bears), anything resembling a plot dissolves after a few pages of slightly bored or mildly anxious introspection, and the language… Continue reading

  • Fear and Loathing in Seattle

    It was forty years ago that Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came forth blinking and convulsing with manic, paranoid brilliance into the light, and what a long strange trip it’s been! Long acknowledged as a cult classic, as the decades pass by without lessening the immediacy and scathing volatility of Thompson’s drug-fuelled picaresque in quest… Continue reading

  • Cult Classics: Against the Grain

    Alternative to what? In a sea of sameness, the heroes of these cult classics march to the beat of their own drum. Brautigan, Richard Trout Fishing in America Drifting along with the flow of time, spinning in revelatory eddies, or striding against the cultural mainstream, we search for that elusive perfect spot to catch a… Continue reading

  • Cult Classics: Into the Dark

    Strange things lurk in dark places. Another helping of titles that our readers keep coming back for, year after year. Andrews, V.C. Flowers in the Attic Shocking carnal secrets; torments of the body and the mind; for the Dollangangers, it’s all in the family. After 30 years, this lurid gothic tale is still going strong.… Continue reading

  • Cult Classics: Nightmare Visions

    Dystopian fiction is all the rage at the moment, but grim visions of the world as it might become, or as it already is, are nothing new. Here are some masterful views of our world glimpsed through a glass darkly that are perennially popular with our readers, and with good reason. Atwood, Margaret The Handmaid’s Tale A… Continue reading