For most of the 1990s, Tsunami combined deft lyrics and charged music to create some of that decade’s most enduring work. Now, the group’s discography has been collected by Numero Group as the collection Loud Is As, and the band is heading back on the road with longtime friends Ida. I spoke with Tsunami co-founder Kristin Thomson about the group’s return, the process of assembling the new collection, and the questions of art and ethics that they navigated then and now.
The work of Ursula Villarreal-Moura abounds with appealing qualities, from formal innovation to a penchant for reckoning with big ethical questions. Her debut novel Like Happiness tells the story of Tatum, a young woman who forms a connection with a writer she’s long admired — and later comes to question certain things she’d long taken for granted about that relationship. I talked with Villarreal-Moura about the genesis of that novel, writing about feeling at home, and finding the right structure to tell this story.
In our afternoon reading: thoughts on Damon Locks’s new album, remembering Gene Hackman, and more.
I’ve known Kate Axelrod for ages now, and it’s been a pleasure to watch her evolve as a writer — as well as being able to publish her work in these pages. Her latest book, the collection How To Get Along Without Me, follows a group of people as they search for emotional connections and a better understanding of the world. It’s highly recommended, but don’t take my word for it: Axelrod’s collection was recently longlisted for The Story Prize as well. We chatted over email about the evolution of this collection and what it was like to put it all together.
I first met Christina Cooke when we read together at an event in Woodstock in 2022. That was long before the publication of her debut novel Broughtupsy, about a woman grieving the loss of her brother and seeking to reconnect with her estranged sister in Jamaica. It’s a powerful book with a subtle precision in how its characters interact with one another and make their way through the world. With Broughtupsy now out in paperback, I talked with Cooke about the challenges of writing it, how to best to evoke the recent past, and our mutual admiration of Ali Smith.
At 4Columns, thoughts on Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea. The CLMP has a roundup of recent work from member magazines. Jim Ruland on his favorite music of 2024. At WWAC, thoughts on Naomi Kritzer’s fiction. Bookmunch looked at the year to come in books. Aquarium Drunkard considered a Terry Riley reissue. The Chicago Review of Books explored Orlando Reade’s new book. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, and sign up for our mailing list.
Jhanvi, the protagonist of Naomi Kanakia’s novel The Default World, refers to an ongoing project of hers as a “marriage plot” a few times over the course of the book. This is an eminently accurate description of what Jhanvi is up to: she’s in the process of trying to marry a tech-bro friend of hers so that his health insurance will cover her gender-affirming care. But it’s also a nod on Kanakia’s part to the territory she’s entered with this book. On the one hand, it’s a spot-on satire of a certain segment of the tech world; on the other hand, it’s a book that’s in the grand tradition of, say, Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.
The trailer for the new film Y2K gives viewers a pretty good idea of the structure of the film it’s promoting: what begins as a high school comedy abruptly shifts gears into horror — a mash-up of American Pie and Maximum Overdrive, maybe. When I went to the Alamo Drafthouse on Tuesday to watch it, I thought about another point of comparison during much of the film: Attack the Block, another movie that effectively blends comedy, horror, and science fiction. But it wasn’t until Y2K’s climax that I realized that the best point of comparison wasn’t any of these films. Instead, it was Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.