The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir by Claude Lanzmann Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux; 544 p. Memoirs used to belong to the realm of the accomplished. In this sense, an essential question has always haunted the memoir i.e. why should I read about your life? We used to know the answer. After a singular life of historic importance a person felt obligated or entitled to write their life story. Now memoirs belong to the young, to the not yet accomplished. Whereas memoirs […]
What Now? After The Controversy with Mike Daisey
What does the day or week after controversy look like on a human face? Can you notice fatigue, or despair, or stubborn resolve etched into a person’s skin? How long after a controversy should you wait before you get back into the ring? Can we conceive of an etiquette of controversy? With these questions in mind, I went to see the much maligned Mike Daisey speak last night at Symphony Space.
Afternoon Bites: Happy Birthday Word Riot, David Milch, Steven Millhauser, And More
File under: genius ideas we’re amazed no one has had before: Hunx will be writing an advice column for Sound of the City. Happy tenth birthday, Word Riot! And in the piece linked right there, one can find the news that WR will be releasing a collection of Nick Antosca’s fiction later this year. We’re looking forward to that one. At Bomb, Catherine Lacey chats with Amelia Gray. Alan Sepinwall chats with David Milch about series finales, intentional and otherwise. Steven […]
Destruction, Discomfort, and Enlightenment: On Matt Mullins’s “Three Ways of The Saw”
Three Ways of the Saw by Matt Mullins Atticus Books; 216 p. Matt Mullins’s debut book of short stories, Three Ways of The Saw, left me feeling vulnerable, hurt, shocked, appalled, exposed, enlightened, moved, even inspired; just feeling a strange range of emotions, deeply, in a way I haven’t felt from a book in a while. Mullins, a creative writing professor at Ball State University, as well as a fellow in an experimental fiction center, writes with an acute sense […]
The greatest literary battle royal of them all
The Tournament of Books has begun. Prepare for blood.
Two young intellectual dudes talking about Guy Debord
Posted by Jason Diamond I take back every single time made fun of the New York Times in the past. I take it all back because of one single quote from the piece on The New Inquiry: “Tim Barker, a junior at Columbia, awkwardly admitted that he, too, had chosen a reading from Debord. (What are the odds?)” What are the odds that two dudes hanging out in a secret bookstore would both be looking to read a little Guy […]
Morning Bites: PANK in Brooklyn, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and much more
PANK takes over Brooklyn tomorrow. Friends like Deb Olin Unferth, Melissa Broder, and Sean Doyle will be reading. Using Joan Didion logic to discuss Michelle Bachman. Remembering Hunter S. Thompson as a writer, and not so much Hunter S. Thompson as a drug crazed lunatic. Michael Kimball wanted to be a basketball player, and other assorted tidbits about his life. This summer’s most beautiful books. Not sure if they’re any good…
Morning Bites: Ten Thousand Saints, book making videos, threatening Bloomberg, and more
Eleanor Henderson’s coming of age punk/straight edge novel, Ten Thousand Saints, is discussed at the Boston Globe. A nifty little documentary on how books are made from sometime around the late 1940s. (Thanks to @Bookish_Type) Young kids threatening Mayor Michael Bloomberg not to close libraries. Reflecting on J.D. Salinger. Things we didn’t think we’d ever type: Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen playing Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud in a David Cronenberg film.