How Should A Person Be?: A Novel From Life By Sheila Heti Henry Holt & Co., 306 p. Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?: A Novel From Life has taken a roundabout path to publication in the United States. Excerpts first appeared in n+1 in late 2010, but the book had no US publisher at the time; it was floating around in Canada for just over a year before the book came out in the US this week. What […]
Afternoon Bites: Lunch at the NYPL, Cats With Money, Charles Portis, and more
Pegged to an exhibition on lunch (!) that’s opening at the New York Public Library on Friday, there’s a brief history of the Automat over at the NYT. “Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians! I am genuinely stunned by this. Since you appear to love first generation Indie Rock, and as a founding member of a first generation Indie Rock […]
Morning Bites: Egan Talks Tweets, Sheila Heti, The Travel Almanac, Tangerine Dream, and More
“I realized that writing can change the experience of living in a certain way.” – Emily Keeler of The New Inquiry talks to Sheila Heti. Jennifer Egan talks about tweeting her story, while Jonathan Lethem, Junot Díaz, and Sam Lipsyte talk science fiction at The New Yorker. The latest issue of The Travel Almanac is out. Composer Timothy Andres explains why it can sometimes be hard to write music for other artists. Moonrise Kingdom breaks a record. A whole bunch of films […]
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 […]
Indexing: A Canadian copy of Sheila Heti, Punk Planet, Tournament of Books, Adam Wilson, NYRB Classics, and more
Jason Diamond Bought a bunch of stuff from Quimby’s in Chicago recently, including a copy of Punk Planet #1 from 1994. I’d actually sent a guy I’d met in an AOL chatroom five dollars by mail in 1997, hoping he would fulfill his promise of sending me that first issue. I’d been collecting issues of the magazine since somewhere around 1996, and needed the first one to be totally up to date. He never sent it to me. His screen […]
Morning Bites: Gary Shteyngart’s blurbs, Sheila Heti talks to Didion, the bones of Cervantes, and more
So many jokes about being quixotic: searching for the bones of Cervantes. What does Lord Grantham’s Downton Abbey family have in common with Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof? The collected blurbs of Gart Shteyngart. Sheila Heti talks to Joan Didion in the latest issue of The Believer. There’s an exclusive excerpt up now. Hannah Arendt: not the biggest fan of Israel. Lana Del Ray was better in Sixteen Candles than she was on this past weekend’s Saturday Night Live. Follow […]
Indexing: How much Wodehouse can you take(?), Cannery Row, Lispector, L.A. Review of Books podcast, and much more
A roundup of things consumed by our contributors. Tobias Carroll We’ve got two weeks of reading here. This….might take a while. Though it’s a strange cosmic joke that I made my way through the 850-page novel on the list to follow faster than nearly everything else on it.
Afternoon Bites: Helen DeWitt, “The Chairs Are Where The People Go,” Ben Marcus, and more
Ben Marcus’s “Advice from Pooh Corner” can now be read on his site. Big Other features another batch of smart folks, including Penina Roth and Dawn Raffel, talking about their favorite things from 2011. If you’re curious about Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti’s The Chairs Are Where The People Go, the LA Review of Books has a review of and a podcast about the book in question. The Outlet reports from the Portland, Oregon release party for Martha Grover’s One […]