This July, your reading might get weird, with a host of new books dealing with mythical history or bizarre futures. Your reading might get insightful, unlocking a new way of seeing the world or an insight about yourself. Or your reading might be relevatory, prompting you to see or hear something familiar in a brand-new way. Here’s what’s on our reading list for this month.
In our morning reading: reviews of books by Matt Bell and Rachel Cusk, new writing by Salman Rushdie, and more.
To be a part of the literary community over the last few weeks has involved seeing months’ worth of events rescheduled, canceled, or shifted online. In some cases, this has been due to precautions taken to prevent coronavirus infection; in others, it’s due to writers canceling book tours. The Loft’s Wordplay Festival is shifting from an in-person event to one that will take place in a host of online spaces, for instance. As writers, publishers, and event planners look out at this shifting landscape, a host of questions come to mind. If events aren’t feasible right now, are there alternatives? Are live-streamed readings and discussions the new normal when it comes to literary events? Is there a way to capture that same sense of community that the best literary events held in a physical space can accomplish?
In our afternoon reading: reviews of books by Victor LaValle and Gabe Habash, stories by Kevin Maloney and Janice Lee, and more.
In our afternoon reading: checking in with Samantha Irby, Matt Bell on the writings of Denis Johnson, and much more.
In our morning reading: an interview with Tim Horvath, new nonfiction from Nancy Hightower, Matt Bell on Aimee Bender’s short fiction, and more.
I always get something wrong in these. There’s generally one book that I utterly forget to include, remember two days later, and curse myself for leaving out. And this year, I’m throwing in some thoughts on music, so that should offer even more opportunities for retrospective regret. I’m getting in just under the wire with this one, yes indeed.
Last month, I sat down for dinner with Matt Bell during a recent visit that he was making to New York. The occasion was the release of his collection of short stories, A Tree or a Person or a Wall, which includes shorter works taken from two earlier, now-out-of-print books, as well as stories written around the time of his novel In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods and Scrapper. I’ve been interviewing Bell for […]