Jason Diamond Bought a bunch of stuff from Quimby’s in Chicago recently, including a copy of Punk Planet #1 from 1994. I’d actually sent a guy I’d met in an AOL chatroom five dollars by mail in 1997, hoping he would fulfill his promise of sending me that first issue. I’d been collecting issues of the magazine since somewhere around 1996, and needed the first one to be totally up to date. He never sent it to me. His screen […]
Indexing: Bradbury signs, Gang Gang Dance DJs, Jo Walton’s “Among Others,” Johnny after The Smiths, and much more
A roundup of things consumed by our contributors. Tobias Carroll “She was looking at a record called Anarchy in the U.K. by a group called the Sex Pistols. It was a very ugly cover, but I am quite interested in anarchism because of The Dispossessed.” That’s from Jo Walton’s Among Others, a novel set in 1979 about a young woman named Morwenna attending an English boarding school. She reads voraciously; she expounds at length on the science fiction and fantasy that she’s encountering, and this […]
Indexing: Books with numbers, back to “Treasure Island!!!,” a Joy Williams quest, Nathan Englander, Norman Lock, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and much more
A roundup of things consumed by our contributors. Jen Vafdis I read Joy Williams’ Honored Guest for the first of probably a few times this week. Some stories I loved unconditionally, others might reveal themselves to me later. You know how it is when one character jumps out at you in a story, and you immediately cast the role of that character in your mind? Perhaps other Joy Williams fans will agree, maybe not, but I think James Urbaniak (of […]
Indexing: How much Wodehouse can you take(?), Cannery Row, Lispector, L.A. Review of Books podcast, and much more
A roundup of things consumed by our contributors. Tobias Carroll We’ve got two weeks of reading here. This….might take a while. Though it’s a strange cosmic joke that I made my way through the 850-page novel on the list to follow faster than nearly everything else on it.
Indexing: Lynd Ward, Eileen Myles, re-watching It’s a Wonderful Life, Best Music Writing, and much more
A roundup of things consumed by our contributors. Tobias Carroll With an eye towards increasing my tally of nonfiction consumed in 2011, I read Peter Hessler’s River Town. (Much like Jason last week, I must tip my hat in the direction of the Bookavore-originating recommendation.) I found it to be a fascinating account of a small city in China, wedding a candid account of his time there as a teacher with passages that give a deeper history of the region and nation around […]
Indexing: Hodgman & Balzac, NYRB Classics, William Faulkner disciples, Walton Ford, Martin Amis, and more
A roundup of things consumed by our contributors. Jason Diamond I went to Walton Ford’s opening at the Paul Kasmin Gallery a month or so ago, and became pretty obsessed with his work. I guess I’m including this because the exhibition closes on December 23rd, and if you’re in New York, I want you all to see it.
Indexing: Elif Batuman, Sara Levine, Don Quixote, James Wood, Matthew Henriksen, Gaslight Anthem, and a Brief Weather Report!
A roundup of things consumed by our editors. Jason Diamond Right now the pile of books on my desk includes The Common issue no. 2, Divorcer by Gary Lutz, and Matthew Henriksen’s Ordinary Sun. They’re all slimmer in size, so I’m hoping to finish them all this week (Lutz’s especially so Toby I and I can discuss it), and also start putting together my vacation reading list. My yearly time off is coming up, and the stress trying to pick a handful of […]
Indexing: New Directions catalogs, Joseph Heller, two-thirds of Murakami, Green Apple Books, and more
A roundup of things consumed by our editors.