Faber & Faber hires Jarvis Cocker as its editor-at-large. We’re pretty sure Jarvis is the secret sauce the publishing industry needs to get rolling again. So maybe David Foster Wallace fabricated some things… Justin Taylor reviews Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Guernica has a new flash fiction series. J. M. Coetzee moves his papers to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Tavis Smiley to tackle poverty in a new series on PBS.
Indexing: New Orleans bookstores, Denis Johnson, Dwight Macdonald, Jarvis Cocker, and more
Tobias Carroll This will be a short week for me; my reading (mainly conducted on a trip to and from New Orleans) consisted of a small selection of longer books, some of which I’ve either written about elsewhere or, well, will write about elsewhere on Vol.1. (The Four Fingers of Death, for instance.) I will say, though, that Karl Marlantes’s novel of the Vietnam War Matterhorn — much praised by readers whose opinions I trust — exceeded my expectations: it’s […]
Bites: Ayn Rand Dating, Norman Mailer Fighting, Denis Johson Reading and More
Ron Hogan wants you to read The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale. This is what an Ayn Rand dating site would look like. Mailer vs. Vidal, Hemingway vs. everybody who bothered him when he was drunk, and other good literary fights. A video of Denis Johnson reading. Don’t worry everybody: Huffington Post will not turn AOL leftist. So all of you people who were thinking that would be the case, please rest a little bit easier.
Conversation: Michael Hearst
By Jason Diamond Michael Hearst has one of the most impressive resumes of just about anybody I can think of. His band One Ring Zero had Denis Johnson, Jonathan Ames, Michael Chabon, Myla Goldberg, and others contribute lyrics to the album, As Smart as We Are. He’s involved in the Cassette From my Ex project, a multi-instrumentalist that has toured with The Magnetic Fields, a writer that has contributed to McSweeney’s, and from what I gather, a pretty nice guy. […]