This afternoon: a Pulp album turns twenty, Saul Bellow on film, Salman Rushdie’s tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, new fiction from Nicola Griffith, a Juliet Escoria interview, poetry from Tommy Pico, and more.
Quack this Way: David Foster Wallace and Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing by Brian Andrew Garner Penrose; 146 p. By the looks of it, the book, Quack this Way: David Foster Wallace and Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing, a new offering from the DFW legacy should serve as a footnote, at best, on the acclaimed author’s life. In 2001, The New Republic commissioned a book review from Wallace on Bryan Garner’s then little-known book on modern […]
I may have lost track of the number of book groups I’m in at this point. Four? Five? I run one, and am now in the semi-regular position of putting together the reading list for early 2014. (One prediction: the expanded edition of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love will make an appearance.) It’s something I value a lot — getting to talk about books with smart people is never not time well spent, and in a lot of cases, I’ve […]
Dueling takes on a certain recently-reissued David Foster Wallace/Mark Costello collaboration, Peter Hughes looks back at The Mountain Goats’ last decade, Jody Rosen delves into the world of “Bro-Country,” and more.
The first time I read David Foster Wallace, I didn’t realize that I was reading David Foster Wallace. It took me until I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again — which I came to relatively late in my Wallace-reading — to realize just when it was that I’d first encountered an example of Wallace’s writing. It wasn’t in that collection, nor was it in his Atlantic piece on talk radio, my first encounter with his writing in […]
“This is a book not just for poets but for anyone interested in the human heart, the inner-life, the breath exhaling a completion of an idea that will make you feel changed in some way.” Matthew Dickman on Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey. Will Sheff makes the case that a televised Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show concert from 1974 is his preferred “cinematic document of a rock and roll band.” Martin Scorsese is making a documentary about the New […]
Last night the New School’s Theresa Lang Community Center on West 13th Street held a panel discussion entitled “Should Critics Be Harsh?” The seminar was moderated by author/professor Christopher Beha (What Happened to Sophie Wilder?), who was joined by Jacob Silverman and Troy Patterson of Slate alongside Salon book critic Laura Miller. Advertised but not present were author Daniel Mendelsohn and Ruth Franklin of The New Republic. Mutterings within the audience suggested that Mendelsohn had a gig for the New York Review of Books that he couldn’t get out of, and […]
Jessica Hopper put together an oral history of Bikini Kill’s first EP. Which all of you should go read right now, essentially. L’Etoile on a new exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s work. D.T. Max on David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction. Douglas Wolk on Brian Eno’s many collaborations. There will be an Occupy Sandy benefit concert on Saturday. Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi breaks down how much his bands have received in royalties from streaming audio services. Triple Canopy […]