In our afternoon reading: new fiction from Zadie Smith; interviews with Terese Svodoba, Chuck Palahniuk, and Tomas Tranströmer; news of a new Yo La Tengo album; and more.
An essay a week meant to explain why a song is beautiful. Please press play on the song, wait for the ad to finish if there is one, and read the essay during the entire length of the song.
Iain Banks’s final interview; notes on the show “The Fall,” Michael Winslow’s Animal Collective collaboration, Jody Rosen on The Lonely Island, and more.
Talking Yo La Tengo and the New York Mets with Ira Kaplan. Jayson Greene chatted with Parquet Courts, whose album Light Up Gold is terrifically catchy stuff. Dustin Kurtz interviewed the man behind the new DIY-themed magazine The Holocene. Josh Levin on the pinball revival. The trailer for Hemlock Grove, based on Brian McGreevy’s novel, is up now. Eric Nelson talked about his forthcoming book The Walt Whitman House. (We published Nelson’s “A Drink Among Friends” in 2011.) New music from Hilly Eye […]
Big Day Coming is the new book by music journalist/WFMU DJ Jesse Jarnow that tells the story of indie rock as it evolves through the lifespan of Yo La Tengo. Jarnow paints a picture not only of a band’s lifespan or of a genre’s inception, but of multiple decades of rock n roll history, music journalism, and the city of Hoboken, New Jersey. Yo La Tengo, being a band so inextricable from their home venue, Maxwell’s in Hoboken, the place […]
Posted by Jason Diamond I wasn’t going to try and be clever with the title for this post, it simply is what it is: a band that sounds like Yo La Tengo and Beach Fossils. The Hairs are from Brooklyn, and the inspiration for their sound is so simple that it’s brilliant. There’s also hints of Belle & Sebastian turned up to ten (the organ reminds me of the group’s earlier work), and a bunch of other bands that released […]
Juliet Linderman, managing editor of The Greenpoint Gazette and featured reader at last month’s Vol. 1 Storytelling anniversary party, has lovingly and skillfully interviewed Paul Auster for The Rumpus. It is “lovingly” done in the sense that she clearly holds the novelist to eminent, celebratory respect, and “skillful” in that she just did it really fucking well. And Auster upholds it with his writerly charm, eclipsing the recent unpleasing flavor left atop my literary taste buds by Cormac McCarthy.
“Dark wizard ain’t got no charms. They’re the foot-soldiers of a muggle-hatin’ mass-murderin’ maniac and they need to be destroyed.” Lit. John Keats gets the big screen treatment (thanks The Millions) Michael Kimball interviews Gary Lutz (Thanks The Faster Times) Well, now we know what Neil Gaiman’s library looks like (Thanks Boing Boing) “Jane Austen is dead. Get over it.” (Thanks Indichik) Deckfight pick their top five Southern novels, and take the ballsy route of excluding any Faulkner. Music “Ah, […]