Why the heck would Martin Amis want to distance himself from his 1982 classic Invasion of the Space Invaders? Everybody weighs in on the death of journalist Anthony Shadid. Alexander Chee on “The Jeremy Lin Economy” at The Classical. We aren’t sure if the Lin Economy includes the book deal he’s going to land. The American boosterism of Junot Díaz and Garrison Keillor. Want to look like Juliet from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet? Rookie tells you how. Joe Fassler at The Atlantic […]
A year of favorites: Tobias’s Best Of Not-2011
Posted by Tobias Carroll This is the second of two lists of the books I read this year that I most enjoyed. Here, the focus is on older books that I first encountered this year; strangely, the focus here is much more on fiction than on my other list, and I’m a little uneasy that this list is far more dude-heavy than its counterpart. I wasn’t entirely sure where to fit Michael Kimball’s Us, an older novel revised for its […]
Vol. 1 Brooklyn presents: The Greatest 3-Minute Stories About The 90s
So we’re sure you’ve heard the whole “The 90s are back” thing at least once a day for the last six month, and maybe you’re tired of it, or maybe you can’t get enough of it. Maybe you are sitting around holding out that some Pitchfork “Best New Music” mentions Candlebox as an influence. Maybe you’re clutching a Delia’s catalog from the days when Y2K was an actual worry. Or maybe, just maybe, you’re hoping for a bunch of readers to tell […]
Afternoon Bites: NY Tyrant, the LA scene, “11/22/63,” and more
Errol Morris has some good things to say about Stephen King’s 11/22/63 in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, and coins the phrase “the weird quotidian” in the process. (Morris also chatted with King for the paper’s ArtsBeat blog.) Amelia Gray, recently arrived in the city in question, on Los Angeles’s literary scene. At HTML Giant, news of the next issue of New York Tyrant. Alexander Chee on David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp. Warren Ellis’s “The Near Future of Pop” […]
Afternoon Bites: Blake Butler on Dennis Cooper, John Cage, Avid Bookshop, and more
“From the very first sentence, we still find the familiar wicked slant of Cooper’s perennial knack for penetrative dialogue (in more than one sense, and with a degree of simultaneous awe and terror that I believe is unmatched in fiction), though the trajectory of it has been bent again.” Blake Butler reviews Dennis Cooper’s new novel The Marbled Swarm. (We’ll be hosting Cooper in conversation with Brandon Stosuy in two weeks.) At Tin House’s blog: the first installment of Rob Spillman’s culture […]
Another Monday night at Franklin Park
Posted by Tobias Carroll There was a sizable crowd at Franklin Park last night for October’s installment of their reading series. That seemed logical: it was the release party for Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, Blake Butler‘s second book of 2011 (and first work of nonfiction), and the bill also included Alexander Chee, who read from his forthcoming novel The Queen of the Night.
Indexing: Alexander Chee, Ben Greenman, David Lipsky, and a Bludgeoning from the New York Times!
Each week, Vol. 1 editors band together as one to discuss their week among literature and the written word. This is the place to hear about all the best that they’ve thumbed through, bookmarked, lauded, and consumed in the last seven days. This is where “praise” hits the blogosphere bong and becomes “high praise”. This, dear reader, is Indexing. Tobias Carroll A number of smart people had said good things to me about Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh. Now that I’ve read […]