Paul Collins teaches creative nonfiction at Portland State University. He is the author of seven books; his latest, The Murder of the Century, has just been published by Crown Books.

• FULL TEXT
  July/August 2011: The Fickle Needle of Fate
  Who the Hell Puts a Turntable in a Car’s Dashboard?
• July/August 2009: Sobbing Children and Singing Shillings
  William Gardiner’s extraordinary works offer precise musical notation for the sounds made by kittens, crowds, and wheelbarrows.
• FULL TEXT
  September 2008: Buzzkill
  They are engineers, retired teachers, and temporary Mark Twain impersonators. They are today’s spelling activists, and they will be heard.
• July/August 2008: Bite Me: A Brief History of Dentistry and Music
• November/December 2007: A Book for the Millions
• FULL TEXT
  June/July 2007: Ker-Chunk!
  In his father’s garage, Dave Biro built the hit-making keyboard of the future out of nineteen 8-track car stereos.
• FULL TEXT
  April 2007: Namejacking
  Several prime examples of an old species of literary fungi.
• FULL TEXT
  November 2006: The Molecatcher’s Daughter
  James Curtis had the most perfect combination of talents ever known for crime reporting; it took the perfect criminal to set them in motion.
• FULL TEXT
  June/July 2006: A Brief History of Rock Music
• December 2005/January 2006: Let Us Now Gaze, Famous Men
  Unearthing books about the plaster death masks of great historical figures—and several good titles about the exploits of disinterred corpses.
• October 2005: The Hatchet Man
  After his mentor snubbed him in his will, John T. Smith promptly wrote one of the most magnificently peevish biographies of all time.
• FULL TEXT
  November 2004: The Lost Symphony
  Virginius Dabney, Confederate veteran and postmodern novelist, wrote an unreadable masterpiece in 1886.
• FULL TEXT
  March 2004: You and Your Dumb Friends
  What we might glean from the autobiographies of animals and the memoirs of inanimate objects.
• October 2003: Read the Book That You Are Reading
  Readers ask questions about books; lazy reviewers offer answers about authors. Should we send them anonymous copies?
• July 2003: The Road to Nowhere
  Following two defiantly pedestrian first-person narratives around the city toward the source of urban decay.