Zach Baron had heard rumors of a high school football rivalry between Jim Carroll and Gil Scott-Heron. He discusses it at The Daily. Alex Gilvarry talks to NPR about From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. Edith Wharton: born into wealth, great writer, kinda awkward. Pay attention to this Leonard Cohen kid who has a poem in this week’s New Yorker. He’s gonna be huge. We’re living in William Gibson’s future. The New York Times on Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavor. At Slate: Matthew […]
Morning Bites: Townes Van Zandt, Edith Wharton in Massachusetts, a Sportswriting century, Jesmyn Ward, and more
Aretha Sills remembers Townes Van Zandt at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Dana Spiotta is the featured guest on this week’s Other People podcast. Massachusetts reclaims Edith Wharton from Manhattan high society. Parul Sehgal reviews Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones for The New York Times. The Atlantic takes a look at 100 years of sportswriting. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, and our Tumblr. Got tips for Bites? Info@Vol1brooklyn.com
Morning Bites: Writers for Occupy Oakland, Edith Wharton, Bosworth’s e-chap, Weather Underground, Chip Kidd,
Dave Eggers, Michael Pollan, and other writers denounce the City of Oakland’s response to the Occupy protests. Professor Edith Wharton teaches class at HTML Giant. Mel Bosworth and Christy Crutchfield have a new e-chapbook out on Deckfight called The Five Lost Senses of Carl. Chip Kidd is going to write a Batman graphic novel. Gary Shteyngart talks to The Atlantic. So on that movie Anonymous about William Shakespeare… A 1976 documentary on the Weather Underground. Women from the 1930s dressed like mythological […]
Yelp reviews for Edith Wharton, Hemingway, and Edgar Allan Poe
Posted By Jason Diamond Yelp reviews tend to serve two purposes for me: they tell me whether or not a place is good at giving people food poisoning, or they help me kill time when I’m bored and Wikipedia and Youtube just won’t do. I’m not sure if I’d call my obsession with reading Yelp reviews strange or quirky, after all, some of my friends spend hours of their day reading over Craigslist missed connections (or the n+1 version…), and […]
Indexing: Jet-lag literature, Nabokov, The Believer, Edith Wharton, and more
Tobias Carroll And lo: there was the literature of jet-lag. The second time around, the strengths of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition remained intact: haunted characters and a pinpoint command of culture. Its flaws — notably, a conclusion that effectively sidelines the novel’s protagonist — remained present. And still, Pattern Recognition may well be my favorite of Gibson’s books: a morally resonant, deeply contemporary thriller that hits nearly all of my sweet spots. (Mysterious films, subcultural intrigue, globetrotting.) Were I fond of […]
Bites: Best Book Covers, “Bush-League Method acting,” Social Thuggery, and More
Enough with the literary-merit top 10 lists. Here are the best book covers of 2009. I personally love the look of Ruben Toledo’s designs, but not at all for the books they represent. An awkward confluence of visionary tones. Who imagines their literary heroines with such artistic flair? It’s unsettling. Lit. & Academia City University of New York dean Ann Kirschner recently read Little Dorrit four different ways (paperback, Kindle, iPhone, audiobook). This week, she talks about it on NPR. […]
Bites: Edith Wharton, James Wood, Twitter, Holden Caulfield, Frank Lloyd Wright
After just finishing an Edith Wharton, it now seems the nineteenth-century satirist is popping up everywhere. In the upcoming New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes about Wharton’s early letters to her governess, some of which will be up for auction at Christie’s on Wednesday. James “King James” Wood is surprisingly charming in this LA Weekly interview. On being well-read: I never seem very well-read to myself — I only notice the gaps, the thin bits, the bald patches (yes, the analogy […]