The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

It would almost be redundant – and probably pitiful, too – to try and summarize The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in a single, obligatory paragraph that precedes an interview with its author, Junot Diaz. The book, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is deserving of long, in-depth coverage.

The legendary editor Robert Giroux passed away last Friday, at the age of 94. Even though his name remains part of an eminent publishing house - Farrar, Straus, and Giroux – one imagines that even the best editors are forgotten well before decent authors.

I live over by Kenwood Elementary School...and steal their wireless Internet signal from time to time...somewhat by accident...Anyway, they've been doing a lot of construction on the school this summer. Right now they're working on replacing the windows, I think, and there's a big yellow cherry picker that goes up and down the side of the building, and a guy who takes out the old frames and puts in the new ones and then, I imagine, eventually washes the panes.