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Max Gray

Read more of Max Gray at Big City Sasquatch or follow him on Twitter @City_Sasquatch. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Encounters, Mount Hope, Conte, tNY.press, and English Kills Review. He co-hosts the etymology podcast Words For Dinner and is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program.
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    Max Gray

    Song of the Day: “These Days”

    The aptly dubbed neo-blues duo The Black Keys have made a name for themselves by giving an old and hallowed genre a fresh sheen. Since forming in 2001, the hard-touring band have won a handful of Grammys and a large…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    First, feast your eyes upon Anne Emond’s visual ode to a lazy weekend and Grant Snider’s cartoon-in-verse, “Outside My Window.” In “Changeling,” Stephen Policoff uses serendipitous advice and the paintings of “mad artist” Richard Dadd to unlock the secret to…

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    Max Gray

    Song of the Day: “PDA”

    “Post-punk revivalists” Interpol have been likened to predecessors Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen, though the stamp of Jim Morrison and The Doors is also audible in their unapologetic, forceful brand of indie rock. Interpol released Turn On The…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    Kristina Marie Darling’s poetry collection, Fortress, is “image-rich” and wonderfully allusive. The setting is the famously decadent palace of Versailles. Like the film Marie Antoinette, “Darling’s book is simultaneously excess and desolation,” writes Sandra Marchetti. White spaces are used strategically…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    In the Saturday Interview, May Cobb talks with Austin-based multi-instrumentalist Guy Forsyth about The Freedom to Fail, his first studio album in six years. In a touching aside about his daughter, Forsyth explains the album title: “…she can only grow…

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    Max Gray

    Song of the Day: “Micheline”

    A standout record in Mark Kozelek’s long career is the critically-lauded 2014 release, Benji. The presence of everyday tragedies permeates the record and propels the keening voice of Kozelek, aka Sun Kil Moon. On “Micheline,” he offers us three stories…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    First, Grant Snider puts us in the right frame of mind and Steven Kraan personifies Sunday. In the Bay of Fundy, between Maine’s northeast coast and the western shores of Nova Scotia, lies an island called Grand Manan, whose windswept…

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    Max Gray

    Song of the Day: “The Singing Tree”

    According to the experimental folk artist Mike Cooper, there is a tree in Almuñécar, in Southern Spain, that used to attract hundreds of birds. It inspired him to write the “avante folk” song “The Singing Tree,” off his recently reissued double…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    Thanksgiving is still three weeks away, but it’s never too early to express our gratitude. MariNaomi shows us how it’s done with a concise list of the things she is thankful for, which includes “the tenacity of young me, who…

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    Max Gray

    Song of the Day: “Lua”

    The expert lyricism in the music of Conor Oberst, founding member of Bright Eyes, is not often rivaled. Bright Eyes’s 2005 album, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, peaked at #2 on the Billboard Independent Albums chart and made Time‘s list of top 10…

  • Max Gray

    Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    First, Diana Whitney reviews Cynthia Cruz’s poetry collection, Wunderkammer, meaning “cabinet of curiosities.” This is a book of “delicious… detail.” Cruz’s poems, Whitney declares, “have a wry sense of humor that tempers the traumas they reveal.” The poet, who was…

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    Max Gray

    Song of the Day: “That Girl”

    Some artists demand our respect right away, and others earn it over time. Justin Timberlake made a big splash as a cast member of The Mickey Mouse Club in the early 90s, and an even bigger one as a member…