1970s

Valentine, by Elizabeth Wetmore is a hauntingly powerful, and beautiful debut novel set in Odessa, Texas in 1976. Wetmore has created four main characters with deep narratives, and all intertwined in ways that make the reader truly understand them in various ways. The detailed characterizations help to draw an accurate divide between age, class and race in west Texas in the mid-1970’s.

The story takes an emotional toll, right from the start when Gloria Ramirez, a fourteen-year-old Hispanic girl, who projects a tough-girl image, is attacked and raped after getting into a stranger’s truck. So

Cop Town is set in 1974 Atlanta. There aren't a lot of women on the police force, and for those that are, things aren't always what they hoped. The only female detectives are used as under-cover prostitutes to catch perps, and the rest of the women are denigrated and harassed to no end.

We meet Kate Murphy on her first day on the job, unexpectedly forced into the working world after the death of her husband. There's a cop killer in the city, and the Atlanta Police Department is in turmoil. Kate is shuffled around because no one wants her, and eventually gets paired with Maggie Lawson for

Viewers might think Les Blank's film A Poem is a Naked Person is solely about legendary piano player Leon Russell as he is featured prominently in the title and cover design. But the documentary is more an artifact capturing Oklahoma folk culture in the early 1970s. More specifically, it captures the hot hypnotic mess of hippie blues and booze that orbits Leon Russell, which may have caused Russell and Blank to argue about its release. Only recently has the film been distributed to a wide audience.

Fans of either the filmmaker or musician will enjoy this documentary, and I hope viewers new to

Five things I hate about Rick Moody:

1. His writerly tone can be absolutely obnoxious. I mean overbearing, arrogant, snotty, condescending, downright rude to the reader.

2. His world view is bleaker than mine, which makes me jealous.

3. Some of his characters are so repulsive that I wonder why I care about them ... and then I keep caring about them.

4. He was smarmily self-important in the interview he did for the Criterion Collection's version of the film adaptation of The Ice Storm.

5. He uses words like "redacted" (or maybe it's "reductivist" I'm remembering) with such obvious relish