Thoughts on the latest from Lee Ranaldo (and the legacy of Sonic Youth); a review of Vijay Iyer’s Teju Cole-inspired composition; Pitchfork begins a look back at a golden era of hip-hop; Wayne Koestenbaum’s new essay collection is reviewed; and more.
Karen Russell on her MacArthur fellowship, celebrating the 90th birthday of Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium, catching up with John Freeman, and more.
Genius grants for Donald Antrim and Karen Russell, looking back at James Baldwin’s essays, Parquet Courts has a mixtape, Jeff Jackson has a playlist, and more.
“I first saw his face when he appeared on Shooting Stars, a surreal comedy panel show that used to be on the BBC. As a teenager I liked him because his persona was borderline depressive, a black hole in the middle of the carnival. I also remember marveling at his name, which sounded too good to be real — I was certain it was a comic pseudonym, like Mr. Bean.” Ben Hamilton on Will Self (and Will Self’s Umbrella.) Pitchfork on Seattle’s […]
Indexing for February 18, 2012: Saul Bellow, Robert Altman, basketball writing, J. Robert Lennon, Nick Harkaway, Percival Everett, and more.
Growing up on the coast of Florida and living for a while on the coast of North Carolina, I’ve associated “skimming” with something more like this. (Or I usually call it “skimboarding” because “skimming” in the context of water sounds like something a lost fisherman would do; see the related: “skiff” and somewhat tangentially: “skip”.).
Posted by Jason Diamond The title of this post is the answer to the question, “What do Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, Sam Lipsyte, George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Ames, Michael Chabon, Malcolm Gladwell, and now Karen Russell all have in common?” From The Hollywood Reporter: HBO is going to Florida with Scott Rudin. The premium cable network has picked up Swamplandia, a half-hour comedy project from Rudin based on Karen Russell’s book of the same name.
Tobias Carroll I spent last weekend in Portland. One of my days there involved a trip to the Stumptown Comics Festival, at which I picked up a number of minicomics. Reviews of several are forthcoming, as are pieces on books picked up at Powell’s, Reading Frenzy, and Microcosm. What follows are brief thoughts on the books I read while there.