Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors
Kevin Nolan reviews KARATE CHOP by Dorthe Nors today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
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Posts by: Kevin Nolan
John the Posthumous by Jason Schwartz
Kevin Nolan reviews JOHN THE POSTHUMOUS by Jason Schwartz today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
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“City of Angels,” by Christa Wolf
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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Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Kevin Nolan reviews Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan today in Rumpus Books.
...moreDAVID WOJNAROWICZ: The Man and The Mythology
Artist 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. “Wojnarowicz…was a painter, a photographer, a writer, a performance artist, a […]
...moreThe Summer (and Autumn) of Dark Money
Foul-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. It is expected that during the current US presidential election cycle spending […]
...moreThe Greatest Show
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.
...moreWe Were Kids
In English for the first time, Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories retrace timeless youthful abandon with mature yet doleful emotional detachment.
...moreOn Not Playing It Safe
“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. You can bat people over the head or you can entice them […]
...moreTonino Guerra
“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. Among others, he collaborated […]
...moreActs of Imagination
It 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 […]
...moreE.L. Doctorow on John Leonard
“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 […]
...moreSam’s Casual Reading
The 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. Here are a few of his judgments:
...moreDebutantes in Distress
Lori Baker’s new short story collection, Crash and Tell, is led by a cast of women whose rich creative minds derail their own lives.
...moreMemory Art in Sheboygan, Wisconsin
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. And this might be what memory […]
...moreNever That Young
“I have all the habits of someone who lived [in New York City] in the ’70s,” Fran Lebowitz tells City Room. “Which is that, if I have a pencil, I have a death grip on it. I see the people on the subway, they take their Blackberry out, I think really? If that got stolen, […]
...moreBill Cunningham
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.
...moreOn Reading Civil Complaint No. 11-2472, Tasini v. AOL Inc. et al.
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.”
...moreLiterary Knuckleballer
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 […]
...moreWalker Percy: A Documentary Film
In 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. Narrated in part […]
...moreAdam Purple’s Garden of Eden
“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 […]
...moreThe Windmills of Old New Amsterdam
Fourth 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. “Somebody dies, somebody becomes moribund, somebody moves to Florida. Most of […]
...moreWashington D.C. Real Estate Advice
At 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. The White House is not for sale (not literally, anyway), but here are […]
...moreFran Recommends (From 1997)
Martin 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. For those who don’t […]
...moreGeorge Orwell’s 1940
For 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 […]
...moreLatest on the Digital Public Library of America
“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. […]
...moreWalking Shadows
A “novel without words” captures the turmoil of the working class: public housing, alcoholism, youth violence, adult bitterness, boredom, crime, and drugs.
...moreSteal This Blog Post
“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. What’s to apologize for? In the age of Google, YouTube, BitTorrent, etc., […]
...moreStrange Powers
It 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.
...moreThe Digital Public Library of America?
Robert 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). Darnton returned to this […]
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