This morning: a list of feminist manifestoes, Matthew Specktor on the Other People podcast, diving in the Gowanus Canal, listening to pop music in rehab, and more.
Books! I love them. I live for words and I live for stories that can move me and tell me how to exist in this complicated, fucked-up world that we call home. Here are ten books that challenged me, entertained me, or stayed with me long after I read the final paragraph. The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud Earlier this year, Messud received some attention as the literary world argued about unlikable characters. Nora isn’t an unlikable character. She’s likable […]
Amy Brill takes us into whaling history, Matthew Specktor and Nick Antosca are interviewed, Adelle Waldman shares her favorite sad young literary men, and more.
Mark Richardson on the new album from David Lynch, a review of director Curtis Harrington’s memoir, authors share their favorite literary streets, Alexander Maksik is interviewed, and more.
When done well, there’s something I find particularly compelling about books that can weave the weight of years into their narrative. Whether it’s a biography that slowly begins to allocate a summary of its subject’s life as that life begins to wind down or an account of the later years of a fictional character that we’ve followed since childhood, there’s an undeniable power in these moments. The best books of this type give us the sense that we’ve come to […]
“Before I was finished, a lot of other influences had been mixed in: there’s a little bit of King James Version, some Greek myth, a little bit of Old Norwegian, a smattering of unusual words lifted from nineteenth-century dictionaries, some Cormac McCarthy and Brian Evenson and Hiromi Itō and Christine Schutt, all these writers who work so well at the sentence level, who write so wonderfully about the body.” Matt Bell chatted with Tin House about his new novel In the […]
Matthew Specktor in conversation with Chuck Klosterman. We really don’t feel like there’s that much more to say about this event, other than it will be those two guys in conversation. While the talk with mostly focus on Specktor’s fantastic new novel, American Dream Machine, you can’t really go wrong hearing what either of these guys have to say about any given subject. The event is at 7 pm on May 2 at Community Bookstore (143 Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn), and […]
“Beyond the consolations of beauty, and beyond the limits of the speaker’s own boundless self-regard, Bellow gives us something else, legitimately ecstatic.” Matthew Specktor on Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. Warren Ellis and Molly Crabapple’s Adriane and the Science can be read in full on Ellis’s site. On bringing the art of the internet into the physical space of a gallery. Smart writers on good books: Hope Reese on I Await the Devil’s Coming; Adam Robinson on Adrian Van Young’s The Man Who Noticed Everything. […]