This Month

This month, we bring you a variety of books about people who go against the grain. Beginning with some real-life iconoclasts, we review a biography of Alice Sheldon, who fooled the world writing pioneering sci-fi under a male pen name; we also consider a louche memoir of fast times at a start-up just before the dot-bomb. Colum McCann's latest novel sketches the life of a great Romany poet, while Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o satirizes an authoritarian ruler. In a memo to would-be rebels, an out-there professor suggests that activists take their cues from video games. Sometimes the truly cutting edge only gets its due in hindsight — that's the testimony of both a collection of eye-popping graphics from '60s and '70s underground rags and a scrapbook of the downtown literary scene of the '80s. We close with an interview with one of the writers who defined that scene, the perpetually avant-garde Lynne Tillman.
- Toby Warner