A great video of poetry being read at Occupy Wall Street is up at Coldfront featuring folks like Justin Taylor and Kendra Grant Malone. Alexander Hamilton was born on this day in 1755 or 1757. We looked at two ways to celebrate his birthday last year. Geoff Dyer talks Andrei Tarkovsky in Queens on March 11th t the Museum of the Moving Image. Kingsley Amis! Martin Amis! Lord Byron! And other literary bad boys at Flavorwire. Diplo’s got a book. A letter Beethoven wrote […]
A year of favorites: Tobias’s Best Of 2011
Posted by Tobias Carroll This is the first of two lists of the books I read this year that I most enjoyed. This one focuses on books released this year; the other will focus around books that I encountered for the first time in 2011 that first entered the world in preceding years. [fragments] Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia is an intentionally messy book with shifting and sometimes overlapping narrators and a sense of history, both familial and musical, looming in […]
Indexing: Geoff Dyer, Roxane Gay, Autumn music, Roland Barthes, Flannery O’Connor, and more
A roundup of things consumed by our editors. Tobias Carroll Finished Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasai last weekend for one of the book groups I’m in. At first, I wasn’t as impressed with it as I’d been with his other work, but over time, the gulf between its two sections — one third-person, set in Venice, the other first-person and set in Varanasai — began to impress me more and more. Dyer leaves open the question of whether […]
Indexing: Ann Beattie at the DMV, Ben Tarnoff, Frank Bill, Geoff Dyer, Orwell, and So Much More!
A roundup of things consumed by our editors. Jason Diamond Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon was my company when I waited in line at the DMV in Herald Square for two hours yesterday, trying to get my drivers license for the first time in New York. Even though I’d had a DL in another state for ten years, since I didn’t renew, I’m a new driver in the eyes of Governor Cuomo. That means I get to go through the entire process […]
Afternoon Bites: Lydia Millet, Victor LaValle, Spike Jonze, and more
“Typically my writing prompt is nothing fancy—just your basic same old, same old. Fear of death.” Lydia Millet shares on artist Dimitri Kozyrev. Geoff Dyer, in the Guardian, begins a series on writing fiction. Victor LaValle responds to Laura Miller’s essay on the National Book Awards. New fiction from Michael Kimball at Matter Press. Simon Cohn, Olympia Le-Tan, and Spike Jonze made an animated short film set in a bookstore.
Morning Bites: Banjamin Hale goes Greek, Chabon for the kids, Rookie, Jill Abramson, and more
The new issue of Paris Review is out. Appearances by Lydia Davis, Dennis Cooper, Geoff Dyer, and more. Benjamin Hale contributes an essay over at Fortnight Journal. While we were busy cooking hot dogs and celebrating not having to labor, everybody wrote about Tavi Gevinson’s new site Rookie. We’re excited about it also, so we figured if for some reason you missed out on hearing about it, we just hooked you up. Today Jill Abramson begins as executive editor at […]
Indexing: 2 Geoff Dyer Books, Cyril Connolly, Dan Melchior, and more
Tobias Carroll This week’s reading involved catching up with some writers I hadn’t checked in with in a while. First: Stephen Millhauser; specifically, the trio of novellas collected in The King in the Tree. “Revenge,” the first of these, reads a bit oddly — Millhauser’s roundabout style entering Patricia Highsmith territory. But “An Adventure of Don Juan” is fantastically structured, playing with some of his fondness for surreal and ornate structures and revisiting classic figures, with a resonant and brutal […]
Morning Bites: Slaughterhouse-Five is banned, Eggers on Sendak, Andrew Bird does Kermit, and more
Today: writers tell the Daily Beast their favorite summer reads, Kurt Vonnegut is banned in a Missouri school, Andrew Bird covers “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” and a bunch more.