Morning Bites: Townes Van Zandt, Edith Wharton in Massachusetts, a Sportswriting century, Jesmyn Ward, and more

Aretha Sills remembers Townes Van Zandt at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Dana Spiotta is the featured guest on this week’s Other People podcast. Massachusetts reclaims Edith Wharton from Manhattan high society. Parul Sehgal reviews Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones for The New York Times. The Atlantic takes a look at 100 years of sportswriting. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, and our Tumblr. Got tips for Bites?  Info@Vol1brooklyn.com

Continue Reading

A year of favorites: Tobias’s Best Of 2011

Posted by Tobias Carroll This is the first of two lists of the books I read this year that I most enjoyed. This one focuses on books released this year; the other will focus around books that I encountered for the first time in 2011 that first entered the world in preceding years. [fragments] Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia is an intentionally messy book with shifting and sometimes overlapping narrators and a sense of history, both familial and musical, looming in […]

Continue Reading

Indexing: Stone Arabia, Marc Spitz, Adam Clark, drinking for Fitzgerald’s birthday, and more

Tobias Carroll This week, I read Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, on the recommendation of Alex Eben Meyer. (Who, you may recall, contributed to eMusic’s project of creating covers for the albums described in the novel.) Ed Champion’s five-part roundtable discussion of the book (which concludes with comments from Spiotta) is invaluable, and it’s left me curious to read her other two novels. At the novel’s heart is a reclusive musician who makes compelling music in isolation; it brought to mind […]

Continue Reading

Dana Spiotta gets the fancy artwork treatment

We think you’ve made it as an author if you are either set up for the rest of your life thanks to your novel getting made into a series of films starring Tom Hanks, or if a bunch of really talented artists create a bunch of artwork based on one of your fictional characters.  (Alright, you’ve probably really made it if the first thing happens.  The second is just really incredibly sweet.) The folks at E-Music got a bunch of […]

Continue Reading