Weekend Bites: Tournament of Books Winner, Wallace Shawn, House of Anansi, and More

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt is your 2012 Tournament of Books winner.  Time to cut the nets down. That time Wallace Shawn talked to The Believer. House of Anansi’s year of publishing. Jason gushes over the new Dent May song at 17 Dots. This week we talked to Lee Ranaldo.  We tried to keep the “What’s up with Sonic Youth” questions to a minimum. We also went to go see Mike Daisey.  It was sorta awkward. We really urged you […]

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Afternoon Bites: The Minus Times Gets Anthologized, James Renner on “Aqualung,” The Tournament of Books Begins, And More

James Renner’s The Man From Primrose Lane is a head-spinning novel that opens as a kind of locked-room mystery and then gets exponentially weirder, and steadily more compelling. And now, Renner has made a playlist for Largehearted Boy. On “Aqualung”: “If you’re writing about creepy serial killers hunting young girls, you must download this oldie.” (Fun facts: one Vol.1 editor has been known to sing a mean “Aqualung” at karaoke.) Today marks the first matchup in 2012’s Tournament of Books: Emma Straub […]

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Indexing: A Canadian copy of Sheila Heti, Punk Planet, Tournament of Books, Adam Wilson, NYRB Classics, and more

Jason Diamond Bought a bunch of stuff from Quimby’s in Chicago recently, including a copy of Punk Planet #1 from 1994.  I’d actually sent a guy I’d met in an AOL chatroom five dollars by mail in 1997, hoping he would fulfill his promise of sending me that first issue.  I’d been collecting issues of the magazine since somewhere around 1996, and needed the first one to be totally up to date. He never sent it to me.  His screen […]

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