Make sure to check out the Rumpus Poetry Book Club’s online discussion with Shane Book, this month’s featured poetry author who brings us Ceiling of Sticks.
You can read the transcript, in which book club members ask Book (real name) about his background, his different uses of form poetry, and his editing process. Also notable: how hip-hop influences his work. “How can one NOT sample,” Book asks, “with the data flow bombarding us first worlders?”
The Millions writer Garth Risk Hallberg just published the essay Is Big Back? and mentions Adam Levin‘s The Instructions, our next Book Club choice. In the essay, Hallberg explores the trend of very long novels. He postulates that perhaps readers feel compelled to read such long texts because we are constantly threatened by the idea that forces in the internet age, like Google, are making us stupider.
In a recent blurb, The San Francisco Chronicle gives Citrus County author John Brandon credit for exploring a hidden layer of America, one that exists outside of the realms of “city,” “suburbs,” and “country.”
The past week provided another smattering of articles and posts about Tao Lin and his latest novel, Richard Yates.
-Jason Diaomond, on the culture blog Vol.1 Brooklyn, posted A Sad Ass Attempt to explain why I like Richard Yates by Tao Lin (“I like that his books–no matter how dry–always seem to remind me of people I knew growing up”)
-Writer Caitlin Colford pubbed a short interview with Lin on The Huffington Post.
-Flavorwire made a list of proper nouns that are a part of Lin’s lingo, and they also provided a handy color-coded wordcloud to illustrate the list.
-In True Stories Invented, AP writer Hillel Italie exposes how Richard Yates draws inspiration from Lin’s own life. Lin appreciates “fiction ‘that seems to be nonfiction,’ how a book can be a novel and ‘totally autobiographical.'” But Lin also says his book is not a response to anything, and more a desire to recall the styles of the authors he admires, including Lorrie Moore and Don DeLillo.
