This afternoon: Catching up with Siri Hustvedt, Jeff Jackson interviewed, thoughts on the new Owls album, Jac Jemc reports from Seattle’s APRIL Festival, and more.
This afternoon: a look at Paul Auster’s latest, thoughts on the twentieth anniversary of The X-Files, Justin Taylor provides some literary recommendations, and more.
Talking Norman Rockwell at The New Yorker, fiction from Steven Millhauser, a new album from Tim Kinsella, Fantagraphics holds a fundraiser, and more.
Tim Kinsella! Smart guy; terrific writer. We quite enjoyed his first novel, The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense — to say nothing of the work he’s done in fantastic bands like Cap’n Jazz, Make Believe, and Joan of Arc.
Because after a Cap’n Jazz reunion and a novel by your lead singer, what else is there to do but score a 1928 film about the French heroine/Roman Catholic saint who your band is named after?
At the Portland Mercury, Alison Hallett looks at Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife, which looks increasingly inescapable: “calls to mind Jonathan Lethem’s recent Chronic City and the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, as much as it does sci-fi predecessors like Philip K. Dick or even Cory Doctorow.” At The Lit Pub, Greg Stahl looks at Tim Kinsella’s The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense. (We reviewed it earlier this month.) Hey, it’s Jonathan Lethem’s book on Fear of Music. At Reading in LA: Amanda Briggs considered. […]
Review by Tobias Carroll The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense by Tim Kinsella featherproof books; 370 p. Titles can be misleading. Tim Kinsella’s debut novel comes with one that’s both hefty and esoteric on its cover: The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense. Given that Kinsella is also known for his role in numerous bands that juxtapose the cerebral, the experimental, and the visceral, one might expect something else here: a narrative deconstructing karaoke rituals, or some sort of surreal The […]
A roundup of things consumed by our editors. Tobias Carroll Once again, the longest book I read last week — Tim Kinsella’s The Karaoke Artist’s Guide to Self-Defense — was read with an eye towards reviewing it here. That review should appear before too long, though I’m still in the middle of mentally aligning the novel’s subtly fractured segments and figuring out what I make of its denouement.