In our morning reading: interviews with Bryan Washington and Laura Catherine Brown, new music from Sacred Paws, and more.
Morning Bites: Amanda Petrusich on BookCourt, Matthew Simmons’s Latest, Nonfiction Novels, and More
In our morning reading: Amanda Petrusich on BookCourt, a review of Matthew Simmons’s new collection, and much more.
#tobyreads: Welcome to the Northern Gothic
Last week, my thoughts were with literary works of the South; this week, I’ve got an eye on three books that channel particularly northern spaces. Matthew Simmons’s collection Happy Rock takes as its setting the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; John Gardner’s Mickelsson’s Ghosts is set in western New York; and, while the stories in Nick Antosca’s The Girlfriend Game take place in a variety of settings, he does have a knack for chronicling bad behavior of New York residents — whether up-and-coming artists […]
Afternoon Bites: Books Called “Joyland,” Jennifer Gilmore Interviewed, The “Happy Baby” Playlist, Alt-Rock Drummers, and More
In this afternoon’s reading: Emily Schultz on the appeal of calling your novel Joyland, Stephen Elliott shares his Happy Baby playlist, Jennifer Gilmore talks with NPR, a number of writers talk about alt-rock’s best drummers, and much more.
Matthew Simmons Wins Twitter
The work of Seattle writer Matthew Simmons has long impressed us. (We reviewed his A Jello Horse in 2010.) But he outdid himself with this utterly inspired take on a certain profane HBO series. @matthewjsimmons: you have won Twitter for today. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google + and our Tumblr.
Reviewed: A Jello Horse by Matthew Simmons
Publishing Genius, 67 p. Reviewed by Tobias Carroll Matthew Simmons’s A Jello Horse is the story of a road trip, a meditation on mortality, and an evocation of a consciousness prone to free association. And yet, with one structural exception, Simmons’s novella neatly shifts from exhausting realism to portraits of a surreal America where artifacts and large-scale animals abound. It’s also a long-form work written in the second person that uses that form effectively, even essentially. A Jello Horse begins […]