Columns – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Featured, Interviews, music, The Reading Life

Vol. 1 Brooklyn Goes On The Road With Deer Tick

July 10, 2023 No Comments

Deer Tick

The Providence-based Deer Tick has been playing together for twenty years, and to celebrate the release of its new album Emotional Contracts, its first in six years, band members have agreed to answer these questions for Vol. 1. Brooklyn. The introspective album, an amalgam of alternative rock, alt country, and Americana, features melodic songs with catchy hooks and sonic guitar loops, prevalent in the closer, “The Real Thing.” Many of the songs including “If I Try To Leave,” “If She Could Only See Me Now,” and “Running From Love” will be surefire sing-a-longs on the band’s 2023 North American Tour, which started on June 21 in Cleveland and culminates in Mexico in 2024. Their website has more information on dates and tickets.

Books, Currents, Featured, Interviews, Poetry in Motion

Currents, an Interview Series with Brian Alan Ellis (Episode 54: Kristen Arnett)

August 12, 2021 No Comments

Kristen Arnett

KRISTEN ARNETT is the author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) and the NYT bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction. She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter‘s Literary Award in Fiction, has been a columnist for Literary Hub and is a current columnist for Catapult, and was a Spring 2020 Shearing Fellow at Black Mountain Institute. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, Guernica, Buzzfeed, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere. Her next book (an untitled collection of short stories) will be published by Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House). She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and currently lives in Miami, Florida. You can find her on Twitter here.

Columns, The Zinophile

The Zinophile: Where Proust, Casinos, and Maps of Thoughts Converge

July 16, 2015 No Comments

A little less than two years ago, I went to the Center for Fiction to see Anne Carson read. The piece she read there was called The Albertine Workout, and it found Carson applying her considerable skill in literary scholarship to the works of Marcel Proust–specifically, the character Albertine in À la recherche du temps perdu. The piece consisted of a series of paragraphs, some very short, some not so much, along with a series of appendices. Besides its inquiry […]

Columns, The Zinophile

The Zinophile: Histories Candid, Surreal, and Unsettling

July 9, 2015 No Comments

The latest installment in Sarah McCarry’s generally essential chapbook series Guillotine comes from Sarah Gerard. The title here is BFF, and the focus is on a now-estranged friendship between Gerard and an unnamed friend of hers. As with all of Gerard’s work, the prose is immediate, intimate, and harrowing–closer to the rapid-fire narration of her novel Binary Star than her earlier chapbook Things I Told My Mother. It’s written as a direct address to the friend in question, but it […]

Books, Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Distant Cities and Haunted Narratives

June 19, 2015 No Comments

For a split-second, let’s talk about cities in prose. Maybe they’re not far yet remain unfamiliar; maybe they’re on the other side of the world. Maybe they’re cities from which we’re separated by time; maybe they’re cities that never existed at all. These three books chronicle scenes and observations from all of the above; they’re works that provoke and get under your skin.

Books, Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: The Sinister and The Wild

May 29, 2015 No Comments

I need to do a better job of reading William H. Gass’s fiction. I’ve enjoyed some of his nonfiction–specifically, On Being Blue and Finding a Form. But his fiction has, until recently, been a blank spot I’ve needed to fill in. I started The Tunnel ages ago and got bogged down; among my reading projects for this year is to finally finish it. On a trip to the west coast, I picked up his collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, […]

Columns, The Zinophile

The Zinophile: Narratives of the Past and the Present

May 28, 2015 No Comments

As New York’s all-too-briefspring begins to transform into summer, aided and abetted by an abundance of humidity, I’ve opted for the only logical response, and made with the reading of zines. That seems to fit, right? This particular edition of the column will focus on two: one collection of poetry, and one issue that includes an host of prose and poetry centered around a particular topic.

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Intrusions of the Miraculous and the Strange

April 24, 2015 No Comments

I’ve spent a fair amount of time on trains in the last few weeks. There’s something appealing about passing through an unfamiliar landscape–or even in seeing how a familiar one has changed, either simply over time or through the effects of the present season. And there’s a part of me that would love to look out of the window and see something strange and uncanny in the distance; something unreal in the middle of the mundane. Though I haven’t played […]