Vol.1 Brooklyn’s April 2015 Books Preview

April brings with a host of noteworthy books in a variety of styles. There’s nonfiction from some of the best prose stylists out there, a memoir from a composer who helped refine a now-ubiquitous style, philosophical novels, collections of jarring fiction–there’s plenty for avid readers to delight in this month. What follows are some of our most-anticipated books for this month.

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The Reading Life: Those Rumors Have Been Exaggerated

I run into a friend at a Christmas party in a very warm apartment. He and I eat cheese by the open window. We talk about work, and this leads to us talking, for some reason, about Renata Adler. “You know,” he says, “there is a great Renata anecdote in the Daniel Menaker memoir about his time at The New Yorker. Menaker talks about how she reported that a hospital was bombed, but not only could they not confirm the […]

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Afternoon Bites: Norman Lock Fiction, Food Journals, Chris Gethard, the “Midnight’s Children” Movie, and More

Hanging out with Salman Rushdie at the Midnight’s Children movie premiere. “If you look at an Isaac Babel story, for example, it’s between two and three pages, and what he does is a miracle.” Dawn Raffel interviewed Renata Adler for The Literarian. Recommended Reading has a story up from Norman Lock. Mary Roach book trailer, everybody. “It makes more sense if you think of The Chris Gethard Show less as a late-night talk show and more like stunt theater, live-action role-playing, and depression.” Jessica Suarez on […]

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Afternoon Bites: Alt-Weeklies, Czech Modernism, Christopher Owens Interviewed, and More

The making of the Making of Americans marathon reading. “As a child, books were a magical distraction from my anxiety — what, 20 years later would be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. At school, every real-life, real-time decision — who to befriend, who to avoid — carried an infinite possibility of catastrophe, but I was safe when living inside a book.” Julia Fierro has a terrific essay up at The Millions. Damon Krukowski on alt-weeklies and the end of the Boston Phoenix. The […]

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Vol. 1 Brooklyn & Community Bookstore Host Renata Adler on April 30th

**Please note the new date** There’s this thing that happens all the time where a publisher decides that the out of print work of an author must be back on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, so the publisher rescues the work, gives it a spiffy new cover, maybe a foreword by a hotshot young writer, and hope that people rediscover the work. In the case of Renata Adler, and her books Speedboat and Pitch Dark, one must wonder why she went out of […]

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