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From Stephen Elliott
City of Angels or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud—the patently autobiographical final novel by Christa Wolf—begins in 1992 with a passport to a country that no longer exists, East Germany. After arriving at Los Angeles International Airport, the narrator Christa Wolf’s documents are scrutinized by an immigration official.
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Robin Sloan’s debut novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore is a fast read and a clever book. The narrator, Clay Jannon, is a victim of the “great food-chain contraction that swept through America in the early twenty-first century.”
...moreArtist David Wojnarowicz died twenty years ago this past Sunday, on July 22, 1992, from complications caused by AIDS.
Cynthia Carr has written a new biography of Wojnarowicz called Fire in the Belly.
Dwight Garner reviewed that book last week at The New York Times.
...moreFoul-mouthed adman and blogger George Parker talked recently with fellow Brit Nicole Powers, in a conversation published on the Suicide Girls website, about the American Dream, the ad business, Super PACs, and what Parker calls the coming “shitstorm” of Citizen United-enabled political advertisements.
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In this intricately woven short story collection, The Greatest Show, Michael Downs tells the sad long story of crumbling American cities through the lens of a tragic circus fire of 1944.
In English for the first time, Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories retrace timeless youthful abandon with mature yet doleful emotional detachment.“P.S. Reading is a commitment. You’ve got to disengage and pay attention. But when done right, you enter a whole ’nother world. Kind of like a great record, at least those of yore which were not background but doors to an alternative universe.
...more“My poems were an essence of images. They had the cinema inside them before I started working for it.”
A quote from Tonino Guerra, in a New York Times obituary about an extraordinary life. Guerra, the prolific screenwriter, poet, novelist and artist, died on Wednesday in northern Italy, at age 92.
...moreIt is mildly surprising that the New York Times didn’t see John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay “My Debt to Ireland” as fit to print in its Sunday magazine on a date closer to March 17, and, actually, it’s sort of a shame, because Sullivan’s piece undercuts a certain mythology many Irish-Americans keep about Ireland the country and Ireland the nation.
...more“There was something of a religious about John Leonard, however much of a principled skeptic he may have been. With his pale complexion, his round eyeglasses, there was a translucence to him such as is given to the spiritually employed. It was as if he had been assigned, somewhere off the earth, to take note of writers and to testify to their value, and was, willy-nilly, a patron saint of the writing trade, of the story-makers, of the grub street international bunch of us.”
—E.L.
...moreThe Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956 was published recently by Cambridge University Press, and on its blog the publisher has compiled a list of books Beckett read during those years, culled from his letters, with commentary from the Irishman.
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Memory is a protean thing.
There is an eerie room of memories at the current exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Walk into it and all the signposts of a collective nostalgia are there but the room is more than the recognizable objects therein.
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Bill Cunningham, longtime fashion photographer at The New York Times, is the subject of a new documentary, Bill Cunningham New York, and what an enchanting film it is.
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A week ago the labor writer and activist Jonathan Tasini filed a $105-million lawsuit in United States District Court, in New York’s Southern District, against HuffPost’s new owner AOL Inc., and HuffPost co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, seeking to “vindicate the fundamental principle that creators of value deserve to be compensated.”
Baseball’s spring training—really winter training—seems pretty superfluous these days. Most players employ personal training staffs, stay in top shape year-round, and hone their skills relentlessly with the aid of the most advanced technologies available.
Yet still they arrive at camp for a month and a half of training and exhibition games each February, all of which could likely be cut down to a couple of weeks at most, with a review of fundamentals and the necessary player cuts and reassignments.
...moreIn Win Riley’s fine Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, Walker Percy’s friends, family, and biographers discuss the life, work, and philosophy of the author of The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, and The Thanatos Syndrome. Most notable in the film is the trenchant commentary and criticism of Jay Tolson and Paul Elie.
...more“I first met Adam Purple in 1978, when journalist Norman Green and I did a story about him for New York Magazine,” says photographer Harvey Wang, in an interview with Vanishing New York. “I found [Adam] to be one of the most intelligent and interesting people I had ever met, and though I didn’t understand half the things he was talking about, I continued to visit him over the years.”
For more than a decade of his life, Adam Purple built and maintained The Garden of Eden, an Earthworks installation that existed on Eldridge Street from 1975 until 1986, when it was destroyed by New York City to make way for a housing project.
...moreFourth Avenue in Manhattan deserves an epitaph, bookseller Walter Goldwater told The New York Times in 1981, for a story about the neighborhood that was then still known as Book Row.
“As a book center, the street is gone,” he was quoted as saying.
...moreAt the end of a CNBC post about how U.S. home values have fallen 26% since the 2006 peak, surpassing the drop experienced from 1928 through 1933, there is a link to the Zillow page for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington D.C.
...moreMartin Scorcese’s HBO documentary Public Speaking is about the writer Fran Lebowitz and, judging by the trailer and reviews, it consists mostly of Scorcese filming Lebowitz while she talks, which might be her true métier. If you’ve seen Lebowitz interviewed, it’s no wonder Scorcese chose to make his movie this way.
...moreFor more than two years now the Orwell Prize has been blogging George Orwell’s diaries, in real time, seventy years to the day that each entry was originally penned. They are now halfway through their project.
The posts begin in 1938, when Orwell traveled to Morocco in order to recuperate from illness, and the online publication will end in 2012—or 1942, as it were, in the midst of chaos, the world still at war.
...more“There is great promise in the digital future for libraries,” says John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, “but we need to work in coordinated fashion across many institutions to shape it in a way that is in the public interest.
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A “novel without words” captures the turmoil of the working class: public housing, alcoholism, youth violence, adult bitterness, boredom, crime, and drugs.“In a recent New York Magazine article about Frey’s new fiction factory, Frey is quoted saying that documentary is ‘a thesis on truth that hasn’t been proven yet’ and that he ‘should have never fucking apologized’ to Oprah. Many would agree with him.
...moreIt has been eleven years since The Magnetic Fields released the three-album set 69 Love Songs—with its funny-sad, sarcastic, satirical songs about, well, love songs.
...moreRobert Darnton, historian and the director of the Harvard University Library, has been writing recently about digitized books.
Last December, for instance, he suggested the creation of a national digital library as a way to solve the Google Books lawsuit (settlement still pending; judge Denny Chin yet to issue a ruling).
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Joshua Mohr’s second novel returns to the seedy side of San Francisco, where the addicted and the lost search for redemption.
A crime novel set in a fictional Mexican city delves into the unsolved murders of two decades.