Features & Reviews
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One of These Things is Not Like the Others
Stephanie Johnson’s microfiction creates rich subtext in few words, making each story complicated and true, and each character alive and familiar.
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Google’s Unicorn Defense
This week in the New York Times, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wrote an op-ed about Google’s efforts in the realm of digitizing so-called orphan books. Despite ongoing legal drama, Brin insists that their efforts are for the good of everyone,…
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‘Why have novelists ceded their ground to science?’
“The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about…
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Michelle Threadgould: The Last Zine I Loved, Cometbus #52: The Spirit of St. Louis
I grew up in San Francisco, the daughter of a man who arguably loved jazz music more than he loved me. So when I say that I grew up in San Francisco, what I really mean is that I spent…
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E-Doldrums: A Book Publisher Confronts E-Books
I know e-books are a cheaper product – both to produce and consume – and I’m certain that writers do too.
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Books, Guns, and Brains
Over at Mind Hacks they’ve got a post running called “A brain signature for literacy.” It’s covering a neuroscience study done that shows “how the structure of the brain changes as illiterate adults learn to read and write.” What’s fascinating…
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Not-So-Ancient History
A first novel set in modern Zimbabwe begins: “Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.”
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Still Bored to Death?
Jonathan Ames has a great blog about his HBO TV series Bored to Death. In this post he talks about the irony of engaging in an S&M session with his former student and then the very next evening being part…
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Notable San Francisco, This Week 10/19-10/25
This week in San Francisco, geek gods at Cafe Du Nord, Michael Bartalo talks recyclable art, Ghostface Killah hangs out on Haight street, and more: Monday 10/19: Get your nerd on at Cafe Du Nord’s W00tstock where geek gods Adam…
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Achebe Fights Darkness
Over at NPR is an interview with Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart. In the article, which is accompanied by an audio interview with Achebe, he talks about his relationship with Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. According…
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Notable New York, This Week 10/19-10/25
This week, Chinua Achebe speaks, n+1 in conversation with Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, Jonathan Lethem reads, composer/drummer Bobby Previte with Psychedelic Furs’ Knox Chandler, photographer Jeff Wall presents more urban decay, “junkyard bohos” Huggabroomstik play, CMJ Music Marathon begins…
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The Rumpus Interview with Alasdair Gray
Writer and artist Alasdair Gray is his own best nightmare. It took the modern Scottish bard twenty-five years to finish Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), his fat, strangely inspirational novel of urbanism gone awry.