Posted by Tobias Carroll At last year’s Stumptown Comics Convention, I found myself in a room watching a discussion of comics and history. I knew one of the participants, Kate Beaton, from her excellent Hark! A Vagrant. I was less familiar with the other one: a writer and artist named Dylan Meconis. Given the examples of her work that appeared during the panel — smart use of dialogue, an eye for detail, and a sense of pacing that recalls that […]
Other Systems: An Interview With Rebecca Gates
Interview by Tobias Carroll It’s hard to know where to begin when talking about the music of Rebecca Gates. Her work with the Spinanes yielded three excellent albums — Manos, Arches and Aisles, and the sublime Strand — as well as a handful of EPs. (And right about here, I’ll point you in the direction of Carl Wilson’s essay on the song “Hawaiian Baby,” as both essay and song are fantastic.) 2001 saw the release of her solo debut Ruby […]
Interview: Danielle Dutton of Dorothy, a publishing project
Interview by Tobias Carroll Dorothy, a publishing project, released its first two books to much acclaim in the last months of 2010. One of them was a new edition of Barbara Comyns’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (which we reviewed last week); the other was Event Factory, Renee Gladman’s surreal novel of travel and language. (John Madera’s review of the latter, for The Review of Contemporary Fiction, provides a good overview.) Both works are haunting and deeply unique, […]
Quick and Dirty Interview with Justin Taylor
Posted by Juliet Linderman It’s not every day that a book about Christianity, anarchy and punk rock is raved up by the National Jewish Council, but then again, not every writer is as adept at prose as Justin Taylor, a Jewcy favorite whose debut novel, the Gospel of Anarchy, was recently published on Harper Perennial. The Gospel of Anarchy is a daring little thing: at a mere 256 pages, Taylor manages to tell the story—from several different perspectives—of a collective […]
Conversation: Mike McGonigal
Interview by Tobias Carroll Writer, editor, and critic Mike McGonigal has been involved in a number of distinctive projects over the years, from his work as editor of the long-running publication Yeti (and the small press that grew from it) to the folk and gospel compilations (including 2009’s Fire In My Bones) that he has curated. (Full disclosure: I contributed an interview with Amelia Gray to the latest issue of Yeti.) In 2010, he announced the launch of a record […]
Indexing, Special Edition: V1 Editors on Their Favorite Literary Romances
In honor of Valentine’s Day, Vol. 1 today presents a special Monday edition of Indexing, in which our editors talk about their favorite examples of literary love, sex, and romances doomed and enduring from a variety of great books. Tobias Carroll Coming of age, I took many a life lesson from the books, music, and movies around me — everything from punk records to Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Age of Innocence. More recently, I’ve learned that most of these […]
An Interview with Patrick Somerville
Interview by Tobias Carroll Last month, I reviewed The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Patrick Somerville’s second collection (following Trouble) and third book overall. Since then, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature has been getting inside my head — its use of dreamlike logic, wrenching situations, and thoroughly flawed characters combined to create a bold and resonant whole. (It shares an unconventional use of science-fictional images and devices with Charles Yu’s fine How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional […]
An Interview with Hunter Hunt-Hendrix of Liturgy
Written By Matthew Caron Conducted at Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn NY Hunter Hunt-Hendrix is the songwriter behind Liturgy, a Brooklyn-based black metal group that doesn’t much resemble what most people think of when they think of black metal, if they are aware of the genre at all. This is because Liturgy are forging new ground in a mode Hunter refers to as Transcendental Black Metal, which dispenses with the nihilism and free-floating hate of Scandinavian black metal in favor […]