I keep this running tab of favorite books of the year on my laptop, which I assume I’ll share at some point in the future, probably in early December when people say they’re sick of lists that document the best books of the year, but they read them anyway. I won’t give too much away, but I’ll say that early on in this year, memoirs and short story collections are really dominating, and I haven’t been that into novels. I […]
I’d like to stop saying we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. At the very least, we should be able to admit if the cover is striking enough then it is totally fine to give the book a little more consideration. Pretty things are nice! We should want more of them in our world and in our lives.
I listened to a lot of music, at least according to Spotify. That doesn’t count all the records I bought and played, the shows I saw, and everything I listened to that wasn’t on my streaming service of choice. Of course, I didn’t need some report to tell me that, I always listen to a ton of music, almost most of my day is spent with headphones on and I’m fine with that. I listened to a lot of old […]
Nothing succeeds like excess in fiction — excess, and the inevitable downfall it foreshadows. You realize that all the sexual escapades and expensive art that Joris-Karl Huysmans’s dandy protagonist in À rebours racks up won’t fill the massive void in his soul, that the sprawling and ornate Gilded Age homes around Fifth Avenue in Edith Wharton’s novels hide dark secrets within their walls, and the gin at Gatsby’s house parties will have to stop flowing sooner rather than later. The good times, […]
Need something to push play on for your next house party or BBQ? Let Teju Cole help you out with that courtesy of this playlist he curated for a night out in Lagos for Okayafrica’s ‘Africa In Your Earbuds’ series. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, our Tumblr, and sign up for our mailing list.
Mad Men spinoff idea: Kenneth Cosgrove becomes a famous short story writer, a contemporary of Raymond Carver, and a favorite of MFA teachers for years to come. And it all starts with his famous Atlantic story that you can now read, “Tapping a Maple on a Cold Vermont Morning.” Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, our Tumblr, and sign up for our mailing list.
Vol. 1 is happy to announce we’re hopping back on the bandwagon and embracing the exciting mode of publishing called print with the forthcoming publication of the zine, “Sandwich Stories.” Complete with cover artwork from Matt Lubchansky, “Sandwich Stories” is the latest release from our Julius Singer Press, and comes with three stories by writers we like who were all given the instruction to write something about a specific topic. To kick things off we figured we’d pick something everybody loved and told […]
It has always bothered me a bit that the Los Angeles punk scene of the late 1970s and early 80s is viewed by some as being sort of behind New York and London in terms of importance and influence, when the fact is that it’s really the opposite: Los Angeles was just as interesting, if not more so, than those other places. For every person I see reading Please Kill Me (which is a crucial book, no doubt), I really […]