I run into a friend at a Christmas party in a very warm apartment. He and I eat cheese by the open window. We talk about work, and this leads to us talking, for some reason, about Renata Adler. “You know,” he says, “there is a great Renata anecdote in the Daniel Menaker memoir about his time at The New Yorker. Menaker talks about how she reported that a hospital was bombed, but not only could they not confirm the […]
It’s been kind of a weird week, as reading goes. There’ve been a few terrific books that I’ve read in the past few days that I’m probably not going to talk about quite yet, but that you will see me writing about in the coming weeks and months. (The authors of those? Jen Doll, Norman Lock, and Scott Cheshire.) But this week has also seen plenty of other reading, some of which has been very plot-heavy; others of which has […]
Good afternoon. My fellow countrymen, members of the impotent press, and assorted farm cattle abandoned at this press conference: I have something important to tell y’all, and I’m pretty nervous, so I’m just gonna say this, because I love you guys, just as I love everyone obeying my laws.
Getting laughs and pathos from the same work of fiction is a hard thing to do. Adam Wilson’s previous book, Flatscreen, did so regularly, with wry observations juxtaposed with a real sense of loss. As good as that book was, his new collection What’s Important is Feeling, is even better — bleak scenarios and economic anxiety coexist with awkward sex, failed relationships, and barely sublimated loathing. Wilson is excellent at finding the pathos of characters one wouldn’t normally find empathy for: […]
You might know Sarah McCarry through her fiction – her novel All Our Pretty Songs was one of my favorite books of last year – or through her work as the editor of the Guillotine series of chapbooks, which includes work from the likes of Vanessa Veselka, Kate Zambreno, and Melissa Gira Grant. Consistently smart and challenging – and with an impressive design aesthetic at work – everything that Guillotine puts out has rapidly become a must-read for me. I checked in with McCarry […]
Last year, for the music writing book group I run at WORD, we read The Feminist Press’s anthology of writings related to Pussy Riot. It was an interesting glimpse at the group, their origins, and the horrific show trial to which three of its members were subjected. Reading it, I felt as though I’d been given more knowledge, but was also hoping to be taken through the group’s art and criticism in the greater context of Russian society. Enter Masha […]
I sometimes picture the peak of Northeast winters, from the season’s first snowfall until about late February, as a hearth beside which friends and family inevitably nest. You’d think you’d see less of these people in cruel weather, but I find it to be the opposite: we come together to huddle for warmth and get a bit fatter in dark and stormy conditions. Unlike me, the season’s cold rain caused Flaubert’s heart to “crumble into ruins”. But Flaubert seems to […]
Last night, I went to Community Bookstore to see Chris Abani and Victor LaValle engage in a wide-ranging conversation that was both informative and inspiring. The only downside: the cough I’d been feeling for part of the day turned into something a little more tenacious, and by the end of the night, I was ready to head home and pass out. Today, I’m feeling mildly delirious. All of this is to say that if I begin somehow losing track of […]