Features & Reviews
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“A Man of Confused but Deep Spirituality”
On October 21st, Jack Kerouac had been dead exactly forty years. You’d be pressed to find a more quoted, misunderstood, revered, and culturally significant icon of the latter half of the 20th century. Yet his literary contributions remain pretty controversial.…
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The Resilience of the Novel
“The media predicted the death of the book upon the advent of radio, and then again with film, and then again with television. It’s happening once more with the rise of the computer and the Internet. It’s possible that this…
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Things to Think About: Publishing Links
The Nook has become the fastest selling item at Barnes & Noble. “What the hell is social publishing?” (via @R_Nash) Robert Weil talks about editing R. Crumb’s Genesis Illustrated. “Is Book Sharing Really a Threat to Publishing?”
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A Squared-Off Landscape Representing the World
A Village Life is the work of a mature poet looking out at the world from a window, but now concerned with the larger cycles in which she participates, instead of the singular life in a petri dish.
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“My Most Embarrassing Fantasy”
“Looking at these photos, I get the sense that the writers (even the young ones) are long gone, lost to an era when people gazed longingly out of train windows, mailed handwritten letters, or actually read books. I can’t imagine…
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Listen to Metal on Metal and Everything Will Be Okay
Just because you don’t succeed the way others define success, you’re not a failure. You just chose to take a different path. And who’s to say that’s wrong? I just finished watching Anvil! The Story of Anvil.
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PPOW Hosts n+1 Party
PPOW Gallery in Chelsea has been lending its space for a variety of interesting literary arts events through its Hostess Project. A few weeks ago it hosted a screening of a film by writers Michael Kimball and Luca Dipierro, I…
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Newspapers in New York: News Is a Verb
If you won’t read a newspaper on a New York City subway, where will you read it? As zeitgeist, as canary in the mine, the habits of New York subway riders signal the end of print newspapers.
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Daniel Pearce: The Last Book I Loved, Mr. Bridge
Evan S. Connell’s Mr. Bridge—a companion piece to his earlier novel, Mrs. Bridge—offers a rare sort of company. And it’s unexpected company: Its protagonist, after all, is a tacitly-but-virulently xenophobic, politically conservative, emotionally acerbic lawyer living in Kansas City during…
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All the Water
“Absent characters often hover around the edges of these stories. Children long for dead parents; husbands deceased, divorced, or ignored wander in and out of thoughts. Creatures both real and imagined haunt people who fear or pursue them.” Anya Yurchyshyn…
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Leakage Problem
The American Scholar posted a fascinating (and a bit depressing) article by William J. Quirk called “Living on $500,000 a Year.” The article is about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns, and wow, doesn’t that sound enthralling. But seriously, it’s an…
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The Rumpus Interview with Lydia Millet
When asked why I publish what I publish, I often reply—I publish in order to understand why I published. Until a book goes out into the world to be engaged with, tussled with, confronted, loved, argued over, no-one, not even…