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From Stephen Elliott
Monday 05/13:
Emily Books presents “What is the Queer Novel?” featuring a reading and discussion with Sarah Schulman and Barbara Browning. Housing Works Bookstore, 7pm, free.
The Franklin Park Reading Series welcomes a killer line-up featuring The Rumpus’ Roxane Gay, Karen Russell, Elissa Schappell, Leigh Newman, and Michael Heald.
...moreMonday 05/06:
Ben Greenman heads to the Franklin Park Reading Series to celebrate the release of his new novel The Slippage
Monday 04/29:
The PEN World Voices Festival is celebrating its ninth year and kicks off tonight with a reading titled Bravery. Hosted by comedian and author Baratunde Thurston, the reading will feature readings from “Najwan Darwish, ‘one of the 39 best Arab writers under the age of 40′; Joy Harjo, a formidable voice in the second wave of ‘Native American Renaissance’; Mikhail Shishkin, one of the best contemporary Russian writers; award-winning Caribbean writers Jamaica Kincaid and Earl Lovelace; 2012 German Book Prize winner Ursula Krechel; Air Force Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S.
Jay Shells, an artist currently working in New York, is taking favorite rap lyrics and putting the tracks on the map … all over the Big Apple.
This project, which Shells calls “Rap Quotes,” consists of homemade but very official-looking street signs bearing rap lyrics at the specific locations of the songs they appear in.
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I always had the sense that I was American but never more so than when I moved from New York to California
...moreHey New York! Come out this Friday, March 8th to Le Poisson Rouge for Sam Lipsyte’s “The Fun Parts” Launch Party!
The event will feature three Rumpus interviewees: writer Sam Lipsyte, comedian Dave Hill, and musician Mike Doughty.
...more“Like many people who moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s, I did it because San Francisco was cheap,” Ken Layne writes in a post for the Awl titled “Is San Francisco the Brooklyn to Silicon Valley’s Unbuilt Manhattan?
...more“There is a tendency to place the center of the writing universe in New York City. This is understandable—countless writers live there. Have you heard about this magical place called Brooklyn? The media certainly has.”
If you needed another reminder that New York isn’t the only place with an exciting literary scene, Roxane Gay’s Tin House essay “A Literary Flyover” will do nicely.
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I understood the impulse to go outside and have sex on the bridge in the middle of the hurricane, because it’s an exaggerated version of the impulse to move to New York at all. This place is a city full of unnecessary danger and difficulty, and to move here on purpose is neither logical nor sane.
...moreWith the Petraeus sex scandal hijacking everyone’s attention away from anything else resembling news – and I am so guilty of gawking incessantly at this juicy side show; I’ll admit I CANNOT wait for the unveiling of the shirtless FBI agent – it’s easy to lose sight of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
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The Peckman River broke its banks on September 14th, flooding out the center of our town, closing roads and causing days of little local streets lined with heaps of the sad, soaked contents of basements, left out not to dry, but simply to be taken away.
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Late summer 2005 and everything’s under water. The news warns us that New York City could be the next New Orleans—flooded subways, ten thousand shattered windows.
...moreTeju Cole writes for NPR about how Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s collaborative project Black Star perfectly encapsulates the experience of living in New York:
“But, shorn of musical accompaniment, we also recognize that these are the best words in the best order.
...moreThe East Coast just experienced an earthquake of 5.8 magnitude, which is mild in geological terms but shocking otherwise. All of us here living too far to experience the effects of the earthquake hope all you east coasters are safe and sound and that the reports that no damage has occurred are true.
...moreNew Yorkers! This Thursday is doubly excellent for you because not only is it Bastille Day, it’s the next Soda Series event, a reading and conversation series. This event is featuring writers Mary Caponegro, Tim Horvath, and Gary Lutz.
...moreJames Yeh writes on the Spontaneous Society for Faster Times, Jon Cotner’s ambulatory, real-life interaction/art installation, inciting strangers to interact positively with one another.
The project was created in hopes of reigniting a certain kind of social spontaneity that is lost on all of us by way of headphones and fast-paced lifestyles.
...moreJonathan Lethem has traded in the crowded Brooklyn literary scene for a classroom in sunny Southern California.
Nevertheless, he’s currently at work on a novel set back in Queens. Lethem, who describes one of his past books as “an all-out Valentine” to New York, is no stranger to writing about that city from a distance.
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What follows is the introduction to Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script, by Charlie Kaufman:
“This show is an act of complete personal indulgence. When the good people at apexart approached me about curating something in their space, they made a huge mistake. After some polite back and forth, Steven Rand said to me directly, ‘We’d like you to do something that reflects your passion.’ I responded, ‘Well, football or what you call soccer is my passion.
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A popular cycling blog spawns a humorous book about mental and physical survival on big city streets.
Emily Gould may be the queen of oversharing—but you’re the one reading this review of her book.A review of David Goodwillie’s American Subversive that veers off into some really important and complicated and basically unanswerable questions about literature, literary reviews, overstimulation, secret weapons, and 21st century life.
...more“Fantasy is not avoidable. The very act of writing fiction is a sin, a lie. One of Disch’s most haunting stories, ‘Getting Into Death,’ is about a writer (one who uses two pseudonyms, at least one of which Disch used himself) who orchestrates her death by fabricating warmth and sentiment toward everyone she has ever known, creating a surfeit of charmingly mawkish moments.
...moreToday is the birthday of one of my very favorite living writers, Samuel R. Delany.
(I spoke once here before about how I share with Junot Diaz an abiding love for Delany’s work.)
All it took for him to become my favorite was to read his legendary, mind-boggling and notorious sci-fi apocalyptic epic Dhalgren a few years back when I was living in an old Edwardian in the Sunset District of San Francisco and working for lawyers in the Lake Merritt District of Oakland.
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Warhol’s sport star polaroids.
Who doesn’t love a sweaty bat?
Contemporary artists design New York taxi signs. Yep.
Seed Magazine, going through their best articles of the year, brings you this look at scientists competing to find new worlds.
...moreAt The Morning News, Daniel Nester reminisces about his former life as a New York poet.
More than that, though, he talks about his abdication from the world of poetry.
“I remember some night when I am eating a Mexican dinner in the company of a Famous Eastern European Poet.
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That little highlighted box, or part thereof, in the corner is 119th street between Morningside and Amsterdam. Or it will be 400 years from now. Or from when this image was taken. Or rather digitally visualized, by the Manhatta Project, a years-long datalogical reconstruction of what the island looked like when Henry Hudson showed up.
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