The Handsome Family should not work on paper, but paper is the weapon of Rennie Sparks, who conjures up Joan Didion and Baudelaire with no insult to either. Her husband Brett sings like Dietrich Fischer-Diskau and strums country-and- western songs on an electric guitar, accompanied by a drum machine from Goodwill. Playing a man’s music in which a woman’s authentic literary voice is declaimed in a low baritone (instead of her epidermis being used as collegiate bait), they are among the only re