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For the past several years, parents and educators have been struggling to convince their young male charges that the written word is just as exciting as “Grand Theft Auto.” In his first young adult novel, Brattleboro writer Peter Gould has devised an interesting strategy to that end. Write Naked opens with its 16-year-old-boy narrator sitting in a lonely cabin in the woods with a girl. They are indeed both writing. And naked.... Read more

American pop culture is obsessed with child abduction. Watch TV on any given night and it’s hard to avoid stumbling on a drama in which a malevolent stranger snatches a little girl from her backyard or playground or schoolbus stop. (On Monday, when “CSI,” “Medium” and “Criminal Minds” are on, you could watch the scenario unfold thrice in quick succession.) Given the relative rarity of such crimes in real life, why do we fixate on them in fiction?... Read more

Any self-respecting child of the ‘80s will remember Choose Your Own Adventure books -- those second-person tales with titles such as Mystery of the Maya and Lost on the Amazon that gave the reader the power to determine his or her fate. If you thought the series had gone the way of Cabbage Patch Kids and Lite-Brite, think again.... Read more

Germany’s systematic murder of six million Jews prompted two questions that still nag today, despite reams of literature on the subject. Why didn’t ordinary German citizens protest what they surely knew was going on in their own backyards? And why didn’t more Jews resist their own arrest and deportation?... Read more

It’s hard to tell the difference between what James Kochalka does for fun and what he does for work. The Burlington comic artist’s day job as a stay-at-home father of two — Eli, 4-and-a-half, and Oliver, 6 months — might sound like work, but the tots are his central inspiration and key artistic collaborators.... Read more

Failure is a relative thing. Just ask any admirer of Nikola Tesla, one of the most unjustly obscure figures of the 20th century. The Serbian-born scientist (1856-1943) harnessed AC electrical power and invented the radio — before Marconi. Yet he died with the reputation of a “mad scientist” and was eclipsed in the public mind by his longtime rival, Thomas Edison. Over the years, Tesla’s strange career has inspired plays and cultish devotion, among both science-minded folks and believers in the paranormal.... Read more

What makes a work of art “primal”? What gives it the force of myth?... Read more

In recognition of the Winter Reading issue, this week’s column is devoted to nine Vermont books that we’d not had a chance to read, or review, until now. But before we get to them, congratulations are in order to New Yorker and Seven Days cartoonist-illustrator Harry Bliss: Time magazine has named his book Diary of a Fly, with writer Doreen Cronin, one of the top 10 children’s picture books of the year.

Props to all the Vermonters who published books this year; just getting the words onto the page is a feat. We can relate.... Read more

Water covers the streets of a nearly abandoned Manhattan. A couple huddles in their home under government quarantine after catching the plague from a stray cat. A weekend warrior desperately maintains his pristine lawn in the midst of a new suburban wilderness. A writer wonders how long he would survive doomsday holed up in Wal-Mart, “my one-stop-shopping ecosystem.”... Read more

Even the most eloquent drunk is still a drunk. To apply that statement a bit more broadly, sometimes there’s great poetry in obsession and addiction — in the determination with which people repeat the same failing strategies over and over, as if this time they might work. Burlington author Jeffrey Lent taps that vein in his third novel, A Peculiar Grace. Once you’ve caught the almost hypnotic rhythms of the author’s language, it’s hard not to hum along.... Read more