Daniel Clowes' middle name is Gillespie; the potential connection he – or, more likely, it would seem, his parents – have to jazz and the great trumpeter and bandleader may be the only part of Clowes' life that he has not sought, with an often courageous and selfless ugliness, to explo

Nathanael West accomplished a few several things in his short life, among them: forging his way into both Tufts and Brown Universities, writing several largely ignored satiric novels, writing several equally ignored screenplays, and running a stop sign en route to the funeral of F. Scott Fitzgeral