When Alice Bag Went to Nicaragua

  It has always bothered me a bit that the Los Angeles punk scene of the late 1970s and early 80s is viewed by some as being sort of behind New York and London in terms of importance and influence, when the fact is that it’s really the opposite: Los Angeles was just as interesting, if not more so, than those other places. For every person I see reading Please Kill Me (which is a crucial book, no doubt), I really […]

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#tobyreads: Space Travel is Boring

So: The Book of Strange New Things. I’d been curious about Michael Faber’s new novel for a while, and cracked into it earlier this week. The setup is simple and almost archetypal: in the near future, a man named Peter is set on a mission to minister to a group of aliens on a distant planet, while his beloved wife Beatrice stays behind on an Earth in which existing economic and environmental tensions are ratcheting up even higher. The terrain over which […]

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Morning Bites: Rushdie pulls out, Padgett Powell, Downton lit zombies, Alice Bag reviewed, and more

Salman Rushdie has pulled out of Jaipur literature festival, saying he fears assassination Muslim clerics protested against his participation. Cannonball Blog reviews Alice Bag’s Violence Girl. How Padgett Powell has written his way out of conventional storytelling. Is Downton Abbey reviving the careers of long dead authors? Dolan Morgan on the mythology of hijacking at Fortnight.  (Also, read Dolan’s Sunday Story while you’re at it.) Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google + and our Tumblr. Got tips for Bites?  Info@Vol1brooklyn.com

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