Sunday Stories: “Prison Rescue”

Prison Rescue
by Sean Ulman

Lufa dreamt of an installation sculpture twirling in twilit sky. Mobile articles dangled from cloud sinews. A bath tub toy boat in a brown bottle, a pastel pink and yellow fishing lure, a Styrofoam Saturn with glow rope rings, a marbled beaver-gnawed driftwood log, an anvil welded down to an anchor, a contained foliage mobile (aspen coins, poplar pogs, maple lapels), the artist’s face washed featureless by frostbite, and a stuffed robin rearticulated in flight with gold wiring.

The artist dashed static strokes to spangle his solar plexus like sun-dappled sea. The robin’s wings beat to beat the band. Looking up Lufa saw mummified fingers plucking puppet strings. She heard the sword-slicing-stone call of the Varied Thrush. The artist painted a gold treble clef on the staff between him and the bird. The singing robin’s beak stayed clamped shut. Again the thrush – ‘Brrringgg!’ – closer.

Lufa awoke. Her first Varied Thrush of the season was calling from a Lutz spruce perch outside her window. Her home phone rang, echoing the thrush, sweetening its peal.

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Indexing: A Canadian copy of Sheila Heti, Punk Planet, Tournament of Books, Adam Wilson, NYRB Classics, and more

Punk Planet 1

Jason Diamond

Bought a bunch of stuff from Quimby’s in Chicago recently, including a copy of Punk Planet #1 from 1994.  I’d actually sent a guy I’d met in an AOL chatroom five dollars by mail in 1997, hoping he would fulfill his promise of sending me that first issue.  I’d been collecting issues of the magazine since somewhere around 1996, and needed the first one to be totally up to date.

He never sent it to me.  His screen name (NationXStates) disappeared, and until a week ago, I never attained issue #1.   Continue reading

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Afternoon Bites: Norman Brannon on Two Lights, Etgar Keret, The Books, and more

“By their estimation, a handful of blog reviews and the privilege to work with someone who sent Lenny Kravitz posters to record stores in 1995 has already cost the band upwards of $109,000. I want to write that number again because it’s so absurd, and then pick up a sandwich board and write it again — next to the words YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG — so that I can boycott Two Lights shows around the country with a small, but angry cult called The Church of Rational People.” Norman Brannon on Two Lights.

  • If you have nominees for the 2012 edition of Best Music Writing, the ballot is up.

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Nerd Porn: Design nerds discuss the form of the book

Posted by Margarita Korol
On a stage at Parsons last night,  designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd moderated AIGA’s well-attended “The Next Chapter: The Design and Publishing of the Digital Book.”

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The Week in Reviews: Ben Marcus, Lana Del Rey, dead presidents, and more

A weekly appreciation for the art of the review.

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Morning Bites: Defending Updike, Salem witch trials, Rushkoff’s leap, Chelsea Wolfe, and more

“The faux-democratic ideal of plain-spokenness, the sense that a novelist should not write too beautifully or he sacrifices some vaguely articulated, semi-mystical claim to honesty, is not a million miles away from the Sarah Palin-ish suspicion of east coast liberals, or a Harvard education, or people who know the dates of wars.” – Katie Roiphe feels it necessary to go on the defensive for John Updike on the anniversary of his death.

  • Watch a teaser of the Bill Callahan tour documentary at Pitchfork.

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Afternoon Bites: Ryan Boudinot, Jonathan Lethem, Tim Kinsella, and more

At the Portland Mercury, Alison Hallett looks at Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife, which looks increasingly inescapable: “calls to mind Jonathan Lethem’s recent Chronic City and the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, as much as it does sci-fi predecessors like Philip K. Dick or even Cory Doctorow.”

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Best YouTube book reviews: How posh can you get?

Posted by Jason Diamond

“Just because I speak with a posh southern public school accent everybody assumes I’m posh or I’m a toff.”

- A man wearing a cravat while reviewing P.G. Wodehouse.

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Reviewed: Alex Gilvarry’s “From the Memiors of a Non-Enemy Combatant”

Review by Jon Reiss

From the Memiors of  a Non-Enemy Combatant
by Alex Gilvarry
(Viking, 320 p.)

From the Memiors of  a Non-Enemy Combatant is the story of Boyet (Boy for short) Hernandez, a Philippine-born aspiring designer who, having grown up in admiration of his fabric slinging uncle, lusts for a future as New York’s most desirable, heterosexual male clothing designer (of which there area bout 10.)  Living off a meager allowance from his parents, Boy is barely able to afford an apartment in Bushwick.   Meanwhile he yearns for success. To him, this means — among other things — an apartment on the illustrious streets of Williamsburg.  Stranded in Bushwick, far from the glamour of the fashion world, he comes into contact with a seemingly affable if not mercurial fabric salesman named Ahemd who commissions him to make a pair of suits, eventually offering to fund his entire debut clothing line.  Boy’s desire for success is so that he accepts Ahmed’s offer despite looming doubts and distrust of his methods.  As Boy’s dreams begin to come to fruition, the stage is set for his eventual downfall, one that results in him being stranded in a government facility for detainees far more remote than the Kosciuszko stop on the J train.  Writing this tale as a long form confession from the offshore facility nicknamed “No Man’s Land” Boy is forced to come to terms with the fact that the decisions made to bolster his (B)oy fashion label also resulted in the new, notorious label bestowed upon him by the media: “The Fashion Terrorist.”

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Morning Bites: Putin’s canon, women writers, Nathan Englander, new Bookrageous, the human cost of an iPad, and more

"Rothko"

Things we are 110% behind: Great works of art turned into sandwiches.

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