In our afternoon reading: television series adapted from books, new Juliet Escoria fiction, interviews with Sarah Gerard and J. David Osborne, new writing from Zachary Lipez, and more.
Notes on T.S. Eliot and hipsters, some recommended reading from Robert Sheckley, a beer identity crisis, news of Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey’s new comic, and more.
In our morning reading: adapting Dorothy Parker poems as folk songs, Julia Fierro on the year in books, Meredith Graves on the year in fiction, new fiction from Jac Jemc, and more.
Colin Dickey discusses Virginia Woolf; interviews with Mary Timony, Barbara Browning, and Sarah Lipstate; smart writers debate Amazon; Teju Cole-inspired clothing; and more.
New writing from Amanda Petrusich, a look inside Mellow Pages Library, the lasting impact of The Great Gatsby, invented literary languages, and more.
The other night, I was out with friends talking books, as tends to happen more than a little frequently. The subject of agency of main characters came up; the question of whether a particular central character was more proactive or reactive. This is something I think about a lot, both as a reader and as a writer. There have been things I’ve written that, on reflection, seem to be more or less a series of things happening to someone than […]
One night after a lot of whiskey and beer, a friend of mine suggested that we head down to Main and rob someone. We had no money but what we’d just spent on the booze, and we knew that when we woke up we’d be hungry. J.David Osborne’s essay “On Not-Knowing” delves into the intersection of surrealism and crime fiction, and gets at how the two can neatly compliment one another. We interviewed Osborne earlier this year. Follow Vol. 1 […]
As a writer, J. David Osborne can blend deeply human situations and prose with jarring violence; his novel Low Down Death Right Easy brings crime-fiction thrills and evokes quietly lived lives in equal measure. His latest book, the collection Our Blood In its Blind Circuit, encompasses everything from surreal stories of corrupt cops to bittersweet accounts of people falling in and out of love (“Like Most Things Easy,” which first appeared as a Sunday Story) to “Gritty,” which deconstructs and critiques a certain […]