In 2004, I interviewed Jim Shepard over the phone about “Project X,” his novel about a Columbine-like plot.  

Shepard was probably the best writer I ever interviewed. He didn’t treat me like some perfunctory annoyance with whom he couldn’t wait to be rid of like Joyce Carol Oates or Clive Cussler, and he wasn’t in the midst of a whirlwind book tour in which interviews were so common that the answers were stock. See Amy Tan.

... and anyone who thinks that’s bad should get decked.

Even avid readers are unfamiliar with Steven Millhauser.  

For the uninitiated (virtually everyone), Millhauser began his career in 1972 with the brilliant novel “Edwin Mullhouse.” Since then, he has written four novels (including 1997’s “Martin Dressler,” which won the Pulitzer Prize) and five collections of short stories. One story, “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” became the 2006 film “The Illusionist.”

Come down here to colonize

us and enslave us—

damn your white skin!

Great hairless sexless

things. No eyes to see,

no ears, no nose,

no fingers even nor toes

to feel with.

No tongues for taste

or talking by—you use

instead those massive

triangulish craniums

“Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, The Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind” by Bruce Watson

Viking, $26, 434 pages

Any generation subsequent to the Baby Boomers has had their collective heads filled with tales of the unparalleled decadence, volatile politics and social experimentation of the 1960s (and the first half of the 1970s, really), that most storied of decades.  What we’re steered away from knowing is that the 20th

Century had a decade at least comparable in its craziness and upheaval, if not more striking: the 1920s.