In our afternoon reading: an excerpt from Amber Sparks’s new collection, a review of Garth Greenwell’s new novel, ranking Lifetime’s albums, and more.
In our afternoon reading: thoughts on a Nathanael West classic, paying tribute to Octavia E. Butler, a playlist from Rachel Cantor, and more.
In our morning reading: thoughts on books by soldiers, confronting racism in South Carolina, J. Robert Lennon on his first novel, revisiting a 1998 interview with Octavia E. Butler, and more.
How do you write about the end of the world? Take that question at face value: how does one’s prose suggest that something cataclysmic has occurred in society, some rupture that has altered our means of communication? Consider it the flip side of Octavia E. Butler’s short story “Speech Sounds,” in which society as we know it crumbles after a biological condition causes humans to lose the ability to speak. The landscape that emerges in Butler’s story is an combination […]
Last week’s column involved some talk of landscapes. At around that time, I’d been reading Walden for WORD’s Classics Book Group–in this case, the edition with annotations by Bill McKibben. This is, somewhat inexplicably, the first time I’ve read it; I am apparently a bad reader of the Transcendentalists. (Really need to work on that.) What struck me–among the things that struck me, really, as there were plenty–was how accessible it still felt. Some works written in the 19th century seem […]
Delving into the writings of Sun Ra, thoughts on the letters of James Agee, Jonathan Ames returns to television, two unpublished Octavia E. Butler stories are being released, and more.
Chris Kraus and Sheila Heti talked at The Believer, Rutger Hauer starred in a Roberto Bolaño adaptation, Califone’s latest was reviewed at Dusted, and more.
Start out your week with news of Neil Gaiman’s BEA appearance; the return of Comics Alliance; the latest album from Chicago’s ONO; and much more.