tobyreads – Page 9 – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

#tobyreads: Getting Inside Heads; Talking Literary Theories and the Beautiful Game

August 30, 2013 No Comments

It seems paradoxical to write about Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary here. At well over seven hundred pages, spanning multiple decades and the writing of several major literary works of the 20th century, and encompassing correspondence, provocation, essays on aesthetics, and thoughts on Polish literature and the role of the expatriate artist, there’d still be uncovered space if we dedicated a week of Vol.1 to musings on it. Still: having sat down with it, I feel compelled to recommend it; Gombrowicz was a […]

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: The Mythic Hits Just Keep On Coming

August 23, 2013 No Comments

Another week, another survey of books where mythology takes center stage — or at least where mythology’s influence can be boldly felt. And, hey, that’s not a crazy thing: myths get under your skin from a young age. There’s something reassuringly primal about them; they tap into certain themes and emotions that have resonated for centuries (or longer).

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Myths & Legends, etc.

August 16, 2013 No Comments

Let’s talk for a second about myths and history. They can inspire all sorts of fiction — from the postmodern rearrangements to straightforward retellings to quietly influencing certain plotlines or passages. They’ve endured for a reason — and they’ll continue to inform fiction (and storytelling in general) until long after we’re gone.

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Unexpected Lives, From Surrealists to Juggalos

August 9, 2013 1 Comment

I made my visit to Terrace Books a few weeks ago, and found it to be the kind of Platonic ideal of a used bookstore: cleanly laid out, well-stocked, and a generally pleasant place to browse. (See also: Human Relations; Book Thug Nation.) While there, I picked up a collection of linked essays by Jeanette Winterson, titled Art Objects. It begins with Winterson musing on how she essentially educated herself in terms of appreciating art; as someone who similarly doesn’t have […]

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Certain Altered States From Zachary Schomburg, Mary Robison, and Warren Ellis

August 2, 2013 No Comments

Sometimes the surreal can be transmitted through bizarre imagery: trees growing inside human bodies; a telephone directly connected to a deity. At others, it can come through a more psychological distancing: the fragmented thoughts of someone besieged by stress; the emotional remove of someone for whom violence is their business.

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Welcome to the Northern Gothic

July 26, 2013 No Comments

Last week, my thoughts were with literary works of the South; this week, I’ve got an eye on three books that channel particularly northern spaces. Matthew Simmons’s collection Happy Rock takes as its setting the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; John Gardner’s Mickelsson’s Ghosts is set in western New York; and, while the stories in Nick Antosca’s The Girlfriend Game take place in a variety of settings, he does have a knack for chronicling bad behavior of New York residents — whether up-and-coming artists […]

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Venturing Into the South with Samuel R. Delany and Todd Dills

July 18, 2013 No Comments

I was born in upstate New York and grew up in New Jersey; depending on how you keep track, I’ve lived in New York for between fourteen and eighteen years now. What all of this means is that I’m not much of an authority on all things Southern — but, like many a reader of literary fiction, I find myself drawn to a certain quality exhibited by writers from that part of the country. Wiser critics than I can ponder […]

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Wrapped Up in Books — The Literary Lives of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Thomas M. Disch, and Gabby Bess

July 12, 2013 No Comments

Like a lot of readers I know, I read — devoured, maybe — Jesse Barron’s interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard last weekend. I’d been reading the second part of his six-volume memoir/novel/whatever he prefers to call it My Struggle, subtitled A Man In Love. I’d read the first part of said work last year, along with his novel A Time For Everything; both were on my list of the best books I’d read in 2012.