Every Friday, we will be bringing you this bite sized guide to things going on that we find interesting for the next seven days to follow. Saturday, November 14th Craig Finn, Tad Kubler of The Hold Steady, and some guy named Chuck Klosterman are doing a 1PM happy hour at Le Poisson Rouge. Ten bucks. Another Hold Steady member (and guy soon to be published on Julius Singer Press), Franz Nicolay plays with one of our favorite bands, The Shondes, […]
Bites: Ayn Rand Dominates and is “Influential”, Paris Review Conversation, Finding Edward Gorey, and More.
This terrifying picture is from the GQ piece on Ayn Rand called “The Bitch is Back“. If you like Ayn Rand, enjoy reading about “2009’s most influential author”. Otherwise, if you are like me, continue shielding your eyes. Lit. L Magazine wonders who will take the helm at the Paris Review with Philip Gourevitch leaving? One of the names tossed around in the comments of the L Mag. conversation for a possible new Paris Review editor is Geoff Dyer. Oh, […]
Video Obsession: Lights, “Fire Dance”
Did you ever dream about Fleetwood Mac gobbling all of the psychedelic drugs in the universe and going to a disco? Oh, you didn’t? Well, you don’t really have to, because Drag City has put out the second album from Brooklyn band Lights, and it basically sounds like the weird and amazing situation mentioned above.
Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren Talking About New Jersey in 1975
Bites: Get Crazy About Nabokov, Zadie Smith, Tao Lin’s Stuff, John Irving is Worried, New Magnetic Fields, The Beets at a Museum, and More.
Let’s go crazy about Nabokov! On the Media talks to Ron Rosenbaum of Slate about his conflicted feelings over the publication of The Original of Laura. Aleksandar Hemon is sorta against Laura seeing the light of day. Nabokov specimen covers. Lit. Village Voice on Zadie Smith’s collection of essays, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. Tao Lin will sell you a bunch of his stuff for a really good price. John Irving is worried about me? I was worried about John […]
Random Obsessions: Finding Food on the Interweb
It’s sort of hard not to like bloggers that just go around eating pizza and report on it, and it’s even harder not to like them when they have one of my favorite zine writers, Aaron Lake Smith, tag along. So Slice Harvester has won my heart. I’m especially fond of the caption involving Aaron’s hand, and the latest slice for review, that reads, “Notice Aaron’s hand poised to accost this slice, symbolizing the ever-present threat of the Capitalist Death […]
We Celebrated Being Us!
Last Thursday, our friends Juliet Linderman, Lev Grossman, Adam Wilson, John Wray, and of course Bob Powers, helped us celebrate one year of our live reading series, and the launch of this here website you are reading these words from. And while we could tell you about how much fun we had (lots), and how much we appreciated all the people who came out and their kind words (lots), we are just going to point you to Jami Attenberg’s blog, […]
Reviewed: How to Be Inappropriate By Daniel Nester
Soft Skull Press, 2009, 272 pp. Reviewed by Claire Shefchik Straight off, Daniel Nester points out that “inappropriate” is standard boilerplate these days, in the media and in politics, for anything that could potentially make someone uncomfortable. It’s annoying, yes, but if you’re Nester, you respond by taking a dump on it, or at least by writing articulately about people who do. How to Be Inappropriate is handmade for frat-boys-turned-English majors, taking a bodily-fluid-covered hatchet to literary convention, as in […]