Counter-culture icon R. Crumb has produced an illustrated version of the Book of Genesis—sincere tribute, or sacrilege? Brad Jones adjudicates.

In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.

If you don’t know The Jazz Book, then as Miles Davis would say, ‘you ain’t never gonna know.’ Brad Jones shows us the groove.

He transformed the American musical – and Judy Garland. Now Vincente Minelli has finally got his due – Brad Jones reviews America’s Dark Dreamer by Emanuel Levy.

Larry Tye has written a book about the greatest, longest baseball career to date; Brad Jones benches the Babe and tallies up Satchel.

You may have passed over Frederick Busch’s many novels on bookstore shelves; Brad Jones convinces you to stop and read the words.

The advent of the CD threw the retail music business into a disarray from which it hasn’t recovered. Brad Jones, a veteran of that disarray, reads Steve Knopper’s account of the industry’s Appetite for Self-Destruction.

Novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers have begun weaving the Columbine shootings into their fiction. Reviewing Dave Cullen’s Columbine, Brad Jones concentrates on the sad facts alone.