“Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.” Neil Gaiman pays tribute to Ray Bradbury at The Guardian. Nitsuh Abebe on the battle over the idea of “real hip-hop.” Michael Kimball chats with Dawn Raffel about her new book, The Secret Life of Objects. Melissa Smith took in an opening of new work from Rashaad Newsome. Becky Cloonan, interviewed at Comics Beat. Jordan […]
Weekend Bites: Gatsby Yacht Rock, Kimball & Heti, Leonard on Grass, Punk Videos, and More
The Gatsby influenced post-power pop/yacht rock Eric Carmen album. Michael Kimball talks to Sheila Heti. There’s more talk of Super Mario Bros. than you might expect. That time John Leonard wrote about Günter Grass. Danny Melendez of Shakefist Magazine shot some videos at our Greatest 3-Minute Punk Stories event. Calm down about Girls. Taylor Swift as Joni Mitchell? Totally not sure if that’s a brilliant idea or the worst mistake in the entire history of humanity. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn […]
A year of favorites: Tobias’s Best Of Not-2011
Posted by Tobias Carroll This is the second of two lists of the books I read this year that I most enjoyed. Here, the focus is on older books that I first encountered this year; strangely, the focus here is much more on fiction than on my other list, and I’m a little uneasy that this list is far more dude-heavy than its counterpart. I wasn’t entirely sure where to fit Michael Kimball’s Us, an older novel revised for its […]
Afternoon Bites: Lydia Millet, Victor LaValle, Spike Jonze, and more
“Typically my writing prompt is nothing fancy—just your basic same old, same old. Fear of death.” Lydia Millet shares on artist Dimitri Kozyrev. Geoff Dyer, in the Guardian, begins a series on writing fiction. Victor LaValle responds to Laura Miller’s essay on the National Book Awards. New fiction from Michael Kimball at Matter Press. Simon Cohn, Olympia Le-Tan, and Spike Jonze made an animated short film set in a bookstore.
Some Thoughts on Rick Moody’s “The Four Fingers of Death”
Posted by Tobias Carroll In the end, it’s the messy works that get me: the movies and books that should not under any circumstances work and yet do; the idiosyncratic works are the ones that invariably burrow into my subconscious and stay there for years. This happens with films a lot: Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain might be the apex of this: watching it is a deeply subjective experience (even moreso than the watching of most films), and it’s less the […]
Indexing: Michael Kimball, Ben Marcus, Caryn Rose, Rimbaud, and more
Tobias Carroll A year and a half ago, I was reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians in trade paperback. Looking at the very back page, I saw an ad teasing the sequel, The Magician King. Initially, I wasn’t sure what to think: The Magicians was as much a meditation on certain fantasy tropes as a satisfying work on its own. Could Grossman sustain that for a second book? As it turns out, that’s not at all what’s going on with the […]
V1’s “Civic Pride: Washington D.C.”: Awesomeness in Action
Above: Fanbase, pre-moshing. Or post-moshing… hard to tell. When does an event not only live up to its hype, but actually exceeds it? Bowie collaborating with Eno? The last episode of Alf? John Madden’s turducken? We can now add Vol. 1’s “Civic Pride: Washington D.C.” to that distinguished list. Held last Thursday at Greenpoint mecca WORD Brooklyn, Civic Pride’s latest edition was the end-all tribute to the District of Columbia, featuring a stellar line-up of authors and at an atmosphere […]
Michael Kimball Live on HTMLGiant
This Thursday April 29, at 9 PM Eastern, Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody and more, will read live here at HTMLGIANT from his home in Baltimore. Special guest appearance by Andy Devine, author of the newly released Words. Mark your book and bring your good hat. (Via HTMLGIANT)