Afternoon Bites: Amy Klein on Kurt Vile, Bowie’s Diagrams, Colm Tóibín, David Abrams on World Book Night, and More

“Now some small part of the grand tradition of the lone American troubadour belongs only to him. He is a natural and unaffected heir to its tropes of the individual. And by now, on his fifth album, he sounds like an elder statesman of a country of his own making — one located somewhere between past and present, inside and outside, complete isolation and complete connection.” Amy Klein on Kurt Vile’s latest. Kory Grow on the last days of Bleecker […]

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Afternoon Bites: Brontë in Miniature, Lonnie Holley’s Art and Music, Will Oldham’s Beer Songs, Bowie Collaborations, and More

  “Perhaps best known as a visual artist, Holley began his artistic endeavors in the late ‘70s as a sculptor, carving two gravestones from scavenged foundry stone for his young nieces who had recently died in a house fire. He branched out into painting and found-material collage, using discarded scrap metal, wire, wood, and whatever else he was able to haul. A creative polymath, Holley released Just Before Music in November 2012 on Dust-to-Digital, his first recorded work to see the light […]

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Afternoon Bites: David Bowie’s Latest, Cinematic Bars, Tim Horvath’s Short Fiction Tips, New Waxhatchee, and More

“It’s a sound rooted in a history that includes early Rilo Kiley, the Mountain Goats, Barsuk Records, and Saddle Creek: small-town, big-hearted indie-rock realism. Through unpolished sounds come intimate, unpolished scenes.” Mike Powell on Waxahatchee’s Cerulean Salt. Waxahatchee also played last week’s Indie Pop Prom, which was covered by the likes of the Times’s Jon Caramanica and Impose. Rosie Schaap recommends her favorite cinematic bar scenes. “…from song one, he sounds like he’s working hard, short of the times when he’s […]

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Afternoon Bites: Chatting With Jeanne Thornton, New David Bowie, Newman and Kesey, and More

  Jeanne Thornton, whose The Dream of Doctor Bantam was excerpted here last year, was interviewed at Bookslut. Hey, new David Bowie album later this year. Melissa Gira Grant on the history of Facebook. Slant Magazine has a look at a new DVD of Paul Newman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Teju Cole shares his thoughts on Michael Haneke’s Amour. There’s a new issue of Storychord up. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google + and our Tumblr.

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Labor Day Bites: Tolstoy Street/Dostoevsky Ave., Blago’s memoirs, Agriculture Reader gets cheap, organic farms in Greenpoint, and more.

We’ve been doing our best to talk about how much New Yorkers read on the subway, and we used the title “24 Anna Karenina readers can’t be wrong” to highlight the New York Times coverage of citizens of Gotham and their literary choices while commuting.  The Millions also took the Russian lit. route, but instead of Tolstoy Street, they went down Dostoevsky Ave. Is ex-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich the next great wordsmith?  No chance, but his memoirs are out, and […]

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