This afternoon: read Adrian Van Young’s story from Gigantic Worlds, listen to new music from Zachary Lipez’s new band, check out an interview with Gary Shteyngart, hear Ed Champion and Sarah Churchwell talk Fitzgerald, and more.
News of a new Lou Reed biography, Carrie Brownstein discusses her memoir, searching for Stephen Malkmus’s ice cream, listening to Chang-rae Lee’s playlist, and more.
In this morning’s reading: the Times reviewed Gary Shteyngart’s memoir; Tao Lin looks at literary 2014; Steve Gunn shares what he’s been listening to; Patricia Lockwood talks with The Rumpus; and more.
I may have lost track of the number of book groups I’m in at this point. Four? Five? I run one, and am now in the semi-regular position of putting together the reading list for early 2014. (One prediction: the expanded edition of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love will make an appearance.) It’s something I value a lot — getting to talk about books with smart people is never not time well spent, and in a lot of cases, I’ve […]
Etgar Keret and Gary Shteyngart love each other.
On the first episode of All Things Considered of the new year in 2001, there was a story on the many children of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins coming together and meeting for the first time. When I say many, I don’t mean Catholic or Hasidic many, I mean 57. The man who crooned “I put a Spell on You” and “Constipation Blues” had 57 children living in various places, and they all came together for this reunion of sorts. I thought about that […]
You can have a truly amazing novel about to come out that might change the course of American literature for the next half-century, but does it have a Gary Shteyngart blurb on the the cover? That’s really all that matters. The Shteyngart blurb has become almost a seal of approval that, while comical in the sheer amount of books he’s actually blurbed, are actually really good ways to tell if you’re going to like a book or not. Inspired by […]
Jennifer Miller’s book trailer for The Year of the Gadfly has everything: Brian Williams, Andrea Mitchell, Dan Rather, Walter Isaacson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, midgets wrestling in a kiddie pool filled with red jello, tweakers dressed up like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and Gary Shteyngart.