ARTICLES BY BARR
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 WAR IS HELL, AND HELL SUCKS
An Interview with Michael Norman Regarding His and His Wife Elizabeth’s New Book About the Bataan Death MarchThe husband-and-wife writing team Michael and Elizabeth Norman has a new book out this month. It’s called...
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  THE DEFENDER OF SNAKES
By Amie BarrodaleI thought of her as the defender of snakes. She was a German woman with shaggy, sandy blond hair. The first time I saw her, she was sitting with a group of paragliders at the Friends coffee shop. A snake charmer, dressed as a holy man, opened a flat wicker basket containing two cobras, whom he briefly serenaded.
"Your snakes hate you," she said. "You're terrible to treat them like that."...
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 SAD STORIES OF THE DEATH OF KINGS
From a Work in Progress by Barry GiffordRoy's friend Magic Frank had a job cleaning up the Tip Top Burlesque House on Saturday and Sunday nights, which, because he began work at three-thirty of the following days, were actually Sunday and Monday mornings. According to the law, during business hours patrons and workers at the Tip Top had t...
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 THE VICE GUIDE TO NYC WAITSTAFF
THE MAN WITH A PAST
These are the waiters found in dark Italian restaurants owned and operated by Lebanese families. They generally work alone, handling the whole restaurant with the aid of a small boy who buses tables and has the mien of a monkey. These men, the men with histories, are ...
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 GARY FISKETJON EDITS YOUR HEROES
The Vice InterviewGary Fisketjon is an editor at large and vice president of Knopf. When he worked at Vintage Books from 1980 to 1986, he created the Vintage Contemporaries series. Among the writers he has edited are Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Patricia Highsmith, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, and Tobias Wol...
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 BURIED ALIVE
In a shrine room in a barn in a village in the Pyranees, it was 8 o'clock at night. The air was cool. On the floor were six or eight antique Persian rugs, and eight pillows arranged in an oval. Sitting cross-legged in the meditation position were the six of us who would be buried alive. Ten minutes ...
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 LITERARY
Book Reviews - The Harvester Of Sorrow IssueIF YOU'RE FEELING SINISTER
This book is a bunch of bullshit. I love Belle and Sebastian more than anybody in the world probably, but here’s the thing about them: They are BORING. Beautiful music...
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 WE GOT OUT
North Korean Refugees Tell Us About the HomelandI met these three people in a nine-story Christian church for North Korean refugees in Seoul. I don't know the church's name; the reverend told me just to call it Seoul Church. It looked exactly like a Christian church in Texas or anywhere in the heartland. The parishioners wore suits and dresses; t...
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 LITERARY/I WANT MY DVDS
Book/Movie Reviews - The Food IssueHATELAND
Some of the worst books ever written are those by “former” gangsters or football hooligans about their shitty, pointless lives. Ghostwritten by alcoholic staff reporters from...
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 TEENAGE SUICIDE
Don't Do It!It began on the morning of January 12, 2005, when Denis Sauvagnac of the Rhône Alps placed a call to the police saying his son was dead. Authorities found 15-year-old Guy Sauvagnac lying in bed with postmortem lividity in his back, buttocks, and penis, and seminal fluid in his rose-colored undershor...
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 STOP KILLING US
A Message To The MainlandYou can tell the world is getting smaller because we're having more and more intrusion by government. About 75 years ago the only time you'd see government was when you were called up to go to war or you needed to get a passport to leave the country. Today they are involved in every single part of y...
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 PRETTY BOYS
Afghani Wedding Singers Are the Sweetest PlumKandahar just may be the world capital of buggery. There's a popular joke here that goes, "Why do birds fly in circles over Kandahar? Because they're covering their ass with one wing."...
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 BOTTLED UP
Making Change With the ChineseThe Chinese ladies who redeem bottles and cans in the recycling machines outside Key Food on Ave. A and 3rd Street in New York's East Village treat it like a job. They wake up early in the morning and collect recyclables in garbage bags attached to shopping carts all day, and then they redeem everyt...
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