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

Ted Conover has been a correction officer at Sing Sing Prison and a cab driver in Aspen; he hopped freight trains for a year while living as a hobo and crossed the U.S.-Mexican border with undocumented immigrants.  All of this in the name of that particular brand of essayistic narrative journ

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