I have few regrets from my recent trip to the Pacific Northwest, but atop the list was my inability to make it to the new location of the long-running indie bookstore Reading Frenzy. I was happy to hear of their successful fundraising campaign (to which I contributed, leading to a print with illustrations of a number of zines that now hangs in my living room), and hoped to make it up to their new space. An abbreviated stay, though, impeded […]
Cross-country flights often give me a chance to work through the larger side of my to-read pile. That’s how I came to read John Berger’s Selected Essays and T.J. Binyon’s Pushkin in the last week and change. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions ended up on my radar through WORD’s Classics book group. Initially, this was going to be what this week’s column would be about: Weighty Tomes, door-stoppers; books with a size suitable for comment. Instead, I’m going with novels. Weird, idiosyncratic […]
This week’s dispatch may be a bit shorter than usual; I’m currently in Seattle, kinda-sorta doing the AWP thing and kinda-sorta catching up with friends and enjoying my usual explorations of the city. As of this writing, I’ve been in the city for seven hours and have purchased two books already; sowing the seeds for future columns? Perhaps.
It’s been kind of a weird week, as reading goes. There’ve been a few terrific books that I’ve read in the past few days that I’m probably not going to talk about quite yet, but that you will see me writing about in the coming weeks and months. (The authors of those? Jen Doll, Norman Lock, and Scott Cheshire.) But this week has also seen plenty of other reading, some of which has been very plot-heavy; others of which has […]
Getting laughs and pathos from the same work of fiction is a hard thing to do. Adam Wilson’s previous book, Flatscreen, did so regularly, with wry observations juxtaposed with a real sense of loss. As good as that book was, his new collection What’s Important is Feeling, is even better — bleak scenarios and economic anxiety coexist with awkward sex, failed relationships, and barely sublimated loathing. Wilson is excellent at finding the pathos of characters one wouldn’t normally find empathy for: […]
Last year, for the music writing book group I run at WORD, we read The Feminist Press’s anthology of writings related to Pussy Riot. It was an interesting glimpse at the group, their origins, and the horrific show trial to which three of its members were subjected. Reading it, I felt as though I’d been given more knowledge, but was also hoping to be taken through the group’s art and criticism in the greater context of Russian society. Enter Masha […]
Last night, I went to Community Bookstore to see Chris Abani and Victor LaValle engage in a wide-ranging conversation that was both informative and inspiring. The only downside: the cough I’d been feeling for part of the day turned into something a little more tenacious, and by the end of the night, I was ready to head home and pass out. Today, I’m feeling mildly delirious. All of this is to say that if I begin somehow losing track of […]
Last summer, Vol.1 took part in a day-long literary event in Prospect Heights, called Popsickle, which brought together readers chosen by a number of literary outlets. Among those reading for us was the Vermont-based poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely. Impressed by what I’d heard her read, I ended up picking up her collection My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer. Reading it, I found myself saying, “Oh my God” in the middle of many a poem; it’s resonated with me in a way […]