Art & Culture: Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm

Twenty years after Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s debut, Ten, Blender senior editor, Mark Yarm, delivers Everybody Loves Our Town (Crown), the perfect remembrance/celebration/recollection of an era that some would say never was and others say never left us. After all, as Yarm tells us early on, even the grunge label itself is entirely subjective:We could argue forever … about what bands are

Punctuation in Peril

Is the apostrophe on the way out? Though he’d be at the head of the line to mourn the apostrophe’s demise if it should pass away, in an essay for The Huffington Post, Henry Hitchings (The Language Wars) posits just that.Before the seventeenth century the apostrophe was rare. The Parisian printer Geoffroy Tory promoted it in the 1520s, and it first appeared in an English text in 1559.Initially the

Fiction: Jane Austen Made Me Do It: Original Stories Inspired by Literature’s Most Astute Observer of the Human Heart edited by Laurel Ann Natt

If we are at the zenith of Jane Austen-inspired hysteria, then Jane Austen Made Me Do It (Ballantine) is its nadir. Not the mania or madness of the Austen-inspired zombie stories popular late in the last decade or even the gentle Austen-solved mystery stories more recently come to the fore. Jane Austen Made Me Do It is Austen as applied right now.The publication of Jane Austen Made Me Do It is