Rick Moody and his band, Wingdale Community Singers, play live for Bomb. Adopt this bookstore cat! Albert Camus: thinking mans goalkeep. Lit zombies take over Iowa. Elif Batuman loves Russians. Sana Krasikov interviews Alicia Jo Rabins of Girls in Trouble Vermilion Sands sorta rule. Spoon get written up in the New York Times. Jonathan Richman is going on tour!
Bites: Tolstoy Investigation, Misfit Pics, Hemingway Cat Poop, Harry Smith, and More
“The murder of Leo Tolstoy: A forensic investigation” at Harpers. Ben Greenman discusses Sly and the Family Stone, and their brief flirtation with being French. Eerie Von from Samhain and Danzig has a book of photography out. You can buy fake cat poop at the Ernest Hemingway museum. The New Yorker gives us a preview of albums coming out in 2010. A new decade just started and already we are talking about the publishing industry in 2020. A book on […]
Bites: Hemon and McCann Talk, Jack London’s 134th Birthday, Because Paul Auster Says so, Yummy Fur, and More
Aleksandar Hemon talks with with Colum McCann nin the new issue of The Believer. I love both writers, but I put this at the top so I could post the Tony Millionaire illustration. People care that it’s the 134th anniversary of Jack London’s birth. If Paul Auster says that Paul Auster is putting out a new novel, it must be true. Steve Almond weighs in on Katie Roiphe’s males writers and sex fiction piece. Weird writer rituals. Dave Eggers talks […]
Happening: Ten Walks/Two Talks Book Launch
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch will launch Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Ducking Presse) on Thursday, January 7th. The book combines ten walks around Manhattan, and two dialogues about walking — one of which takes place during a late-night “philosophical” walk through Central Park. Each walk lasted sixty minutes and gets documented in sixty sentences. Both dialogues lasted forty-five minutes. You may remember Cotner and Fitch from their “Conversations over Stolen Food” at Electric Literature a few months back. 7 p.m. […]
Bites: New Granta, Blake Butler Talks to Andrew Zornoza, Stephen King Rocks With The Cougar, Speaking Teabag, and More
Granta announced their next issue will be based around “Work”. Over at Bookslut, Blake Butler has a conversation with Andrew Zornoza. Chris Farley is talked about. The new issue of Bookslut also has an interview with Daniel Nester. What do Stephen King, The Cougar, Neko Case, and Elvis Costello have in common? This musical. Learn to speak teabag. The Forward’s Sisterhood blog responds to Katie Roiphe’s article about male writers and sex writing.
Benjamin Kunkel Will Make Sweet Love to You, Philip Roth Will Tap Your Ass
By Jason Diamond But my favorite part of Kate Roiphe’s essay, “The Naked and the Conflicted“, in the New York Times Sunday Book review has to be: “writers like Jonathan Safran Foer who avoid the corruptions of adult sexuality by choosing children and virgins as their protagonists.” What I gained from this essay is more evidence that Philip Roth is an old guy who can’t deal with his inability to hump women that he probably treats like shit, Norman Mailer […]
Bites: Ames and Haspiel Have a Talk, N+1 on Avatar, the Sucking of the Last Decade, Blue Moons, and More
Jonathan Ames and buddy Dean Haspiel have a conversation. At N+1, Caleb Crain comes right out and says Avatar gave him a “four-hour headache” in the first sentence. Fictionaut talks to Nicki Pombier Berger from Underwater New York. Slate takes a look at A Separate Peace at 50 years old. 3:AM Magazine talked to quite a few folks in 2009. The Millions calls Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, “a book for years end”. Dangerous Minds sums up why the last […]
Steampunk + Kafka =’s Bar?
Somebody in Prospect Heights is trying to open a “steampunk bar”, but can’t get a liquor license. The whole process is described by the bar owner as: Kafka meets Catch 22. Fortunately, I haven’t woken up as a giant cockroach… yet.