They’re all means of transportation, if in various states of disrepair: …more

Insert your own words in the spaces below to make a wacky story!

The verandah was large and layered with many different coats of peeling white paint. …more

They were rusted and unwieldy, heavy like useful things just aren’t anymore. Carved shakily into the left blade of my father’s scissors it read in magic: COPY BOY. …more

Set in New York City, Another Country presents a group of friends and artists struggling not to be wrenched apart by race, sexuality and ambition.

The novel begins with Rufus, a bright and kind black drummer from the South, who has forsaken his musical promise and sanity in the name of loving a white woman. …more

Kathleen Alcott: Where is the Internet?

Jeeves: Hi, Kathleen. Thanks for writing. Perhaps I’ll answer your question with a question of my own: Where the hell have you been? …more

The books I love are those tangled and overflowing: their magic is the product of the trust the author puts in his talent

Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is nothing less than brimming, and it writhes in beauty from first to last; it is difficult to deconstruct its brilliance, which is many-branched. …more

“Have you ever been to American wedding?/Where is the vodka?!” screams Eugene Hutz of gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello.

In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Hutz discusses the inspiration behind the song “American Wedding.” Commenting on the U.S. weddings he’s been to, Hutz expresses his surprise that “you would even call that a celebration.”

Raised in Kiev, Hutz and family fled to Vermont after his father had been repeatedly busted for political rebellion (several times for listening to the BBC). In his first years in America, Hutz performed with various metal/hardcore bands before starting his own group with the intentions of getting back to his Gypsy roots. It wasn’t easy. Hutz wanted to avoid gimmick and the “exploitation of stereotype;” he wanted to make music that sincerely embodied the Gypsy spirit. When asked about Gypsy psychology, Hutz says only that it’s impossible to describe, because Gypsies wouldn’t give enough of  a damn to talk about it. Carefully, he adds that in his native language there is a word for today, but tomorrow and yesterday are the same word.

Gypsy music, says Hutz, was the original Rock and Roll: “It’s a scientific fact.”

God, he was smart! He had a mind like a hummingbird, he had read every book there was to read, his tongue was sharp, he was funnier than anyone else at the party. …more

Pianist and New Yorker Thomas Bartlett was raised in rural Vermont by two devoted intellectuals. For the most part self-educated, save a few failed attempts at public high school and 1.5 semesters at Columbia, he is perhaps the most famous person you’ve never heard of.

A studio artist who plays alongside the likes of David Byrne, Yoko Ono, Rufus Wainwright, Grizzly Bear, Antony and the Johnsons and The National; last year he toured with Nico Muhly. …more

I always blanch when someone tells me — and always so assuredly, it seems — “ I just don’t really like poetry.”It’s more people, more otherwise avid readers than I would like to think.

It’s a matter of personal choice, sure; as much as I try to like reading philosophy I can’t say I do.  But these people who “don’t really like poetry” seem to see it as an art form that’s too indulgent or selfish or extraneous; they feel they can relate more to characters in storylines. I, on the other hand, turn to poetry when I need something to relate to.  I was feeling that need when I passed Bolaño’s The Romantic Dogs in a window; I was heartachin’, broke, and a line from a poet I hadn’t read in years kept crossing my mind: …more

Author and ex-soldier for the publishing world, former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of The New Yorker Daniel Menaker attempts to break down the industry’s struggle into variables of audience, cost, risk, and heart in his recent essay, “Redactor Agonistes.”