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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
So deep into this other world do I drop, I no longer notice, nor do I care, what’s happening outside the book, in the “real” world. Like a drug, the book seduces me. I can’t resist.
...moreMonday 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.
Monday 04/08:
Monday Night Poetry features award-winning poet Major Jackson and author of the great What Is Amazing
The Franklin Park Reading Series welcomes Heidi Julavits, Fiona Maazel, Teddy Wayne, David Gilbert, and Maris Kreizman.
...moreMonday 04/01:
Monday night the Poetry Project presents An Evening with Clark Coolidge featuring readings from Coolidge, Peter Gizzi, Marcella Durand, Miles Champion, Ron Padgett, Bill Corbett, Anne Waldman, John Godfrey, Geoffrey Young, and Thurston Moore. St. Mark’s Church, 8pm.
“The more you read, the iller you’ll be as an emcee…”
–Rodstarz
In the Bronx, the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective has turned a former candy factory into the Richie Perez Radical Library for Youth. The objective of the library is to promote literacy through radical and political literature that isn’t usually taught in typical academic settings.
...moreIn a New Yorker piece about how women became readers, Joan Acocella describes the moment St. Augustine saw “his mentor, Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading without moving his lips”:
...more“His heart searched out the sense,” [Augustine wrote,] “but his voice and tongue were at rest.” A new idea of reading was taking hold.
Halimah Marcus and Benjamin Samuel, the co-editors of Recommended Reading, discuss the ins and outs of editing an ambitious literary project.
...moreLooking for beach reads?
The Atlantic asked a number of trusted writers and readers, including Sash Frere-Jones, Emily Gould, and Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott, to recommend books “that live up to the spirit of summer while still making us think.”
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The Atlantic examines the above graph and stats, concluding that the Internet hasn’t in fact “killed reading books” and suggesting that we have a skewed “collective memory of past.”
(Via The Daily Beast)
...more“It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.”
At The New York Times, Jhumpa Lahiri reflects on the centrality of the sentence in her reading and writing processes.
...moreDo you want someone to come along and spoil that short-story you’re about to begin? Yes you do, says this study. The “Hedonic Ratings of Spoiled & Unspoiled Stories” chart, compiled by U.C. San Diego researchers, addresses three distinct genres—ironic twist stories (that’s a genre?), mysteries and literary stories.
...moreHundreds will gather later this month at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to set a new world record for the longest reading chain. You may be asking yourself, what is a reading chain? Well, let me fill you in.
A reading chain is when a group of people gather in one location to read aloud from a particular book.
...moreThis week in San Francisco: Clown Burlesque, stories about food, art shows, magazine readings, and Cyclops Wearing Flip Flops.
Monday 1/24: This month at Cat’s Pajamas, get your regular dose of burlesque with a side of clown as Dottie Lux co-hosts the monthly show of music and steamy performances. $5, 21+, 8pm @ 3225 22nd Street.
...moreI wasn’t a bad kid growing up, I just liked to steal things — vodka, cigars, communion wine — and set things on fire. Once or twice I used profanity in the presence of a nun. But I only had my rights read to me once and even then the cop looked pretty bored about it.
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A Rumpus Meditation on Editors, Ambition, and Angry Dependence (in 33 loosely jointed parts):
1. On July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Kevin Morrissey, took his life. His note stated that he “just couldn’t bear it anymore.”
...more“‘No two persons ever read the same book,’ the writer and critic Edmund Wilson said. Let me expand that sentiment outward into the geography of experience: it seems increasingly clear to me that no two persons live in the same city.”
At The Millions, an insightful commentary on China Mieville’s The City And The City.
...more“After years of finding children’s books tucked away in authors’ bibliographies (Graham Greene wrote children’s books!), followed by quick disappointment (how can they be out of print?), I realized that I was having this same frustrating revelation over and over. And when I would bring these discoveries up with my friends, they would have the same reaction (John Updike wrote children’s books!
...more“I think avant-garde fiction has already gone the way of poetry. And it’s become involuted and forgotten the reader. Put it this way, there are a few really good poets who suffered because of the desiccation and involution of poetry, but for the most part I think American poetry has gotten what it’s deserved.
...moreI like looking at my books and often spend several minutes in the evening running my gaze over them. Most of them I haven’t read but the possibility that I will read them is deeply exciting. (Proust is also excited to know that one day I will open his book.)
Right now, as my house is undergoing a delightful transition, my books are spilling out into the dining room and the bathroom and I follow their inexplicable meandering with lustful eyes.
...moreSometimes you read a story published almost a hundred years ago in a magazine and you ask yourself, “Would this stand a chance of getting published today?”
These sentences are long, tangential and laden with disruptive conjunctions. This narrator is all over the place with his emotions and his memories.
...moreGood things happen when people who grow up listening to Thriller become poets.
There’s going to be a new Bukowski exhibit down Southern California way, including his “annotated racing forms” that will teach you his system for playing the horses.
Jason Pinter takes on the idea that men don’t read.
...more“My grief has been all the usual and varied colours of sadness and madness. It has been searing, voluptuous, numbing.
I foresaw that it would be — I have been unhappy, unsettled, unbalanced before (who has not?). I did not foresee that, this time, for much of the time that I was most antic and most lost, most peculiarly undone, I would have taken from me (I would, I suppose, take away from myself) that which had always been of such solace to me.
...moreFriday, we linked to GIANT’s list of reasons writers should not date other writers, but Evan Maloney at The Guardian goes into the flip-side of that question: Can a reader date a nonreader?
“What difference does it make in a relationship if both partners are notorious readers, or if one partner reads voraciously while the other has no interest in literature?
...moreTasmanian Devils may wind up extinct, and not due to humans driving them out of their habitat. The culprit is a contagious cancer.
The British NHS claims sex is good for you. Yet another argument for universal health care?
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“These things, writing and reading, are never, I don’t think were ever, ever meant to be exclusive from anything else. I think they were always meant to be part of the grand fabric of life.”
...moreThe love of reading and the love of books, while almost always coinciding are still, in essence two different things.
If I loved to read as much as I loved books, for instance, then I wouldn’t own at least a hundred books which I haven’t read yet.
...moreThis week, the book blogs have been talking about the future of reading and literature, which leads me to believe that they don’t think it’s dead.
I don’t believe them. The sad truth is that they’re taking Reading Rainbow away from the children forever, which means it’s only a matter of time before the kids stop reading entirely and turn into violent video game-playing, Twinkie-eating, morbidly obese fighting machines that will eat older generations alive as soon as they’re old enough to buy firearms.
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