Features & Reviews
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Zak Smith Gravity’s Rainbow Giveaway
The Conversational Reading blog is giving away a brand-new hardcover copy of Zak Smith’s illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow in a contest held on their Facebook page. To enter, you need to become a member of their group, and write on their…
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The Write Links
Author/publisher Christopher Herz is giving new meaning to handselling. “Every day he takes 10 copies out to the streets and does not come home until he sells all of them.” Artifice Magazine‘s submission wishlist (via HTMLGIANT). Check it out, and…
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Crown of Sonnets
An anthology of stories from the new Russia shows the continuity between contemporary writers and their canonical predecessors
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Why Were Artists Poor?
Reading Jeremy’s post on Andrew Keen and starving artists, I couldn’t help but think of Joel Barlow (1754-1812). Barlow was a poet, one of the Connecticut Wits, to be precise, so my mental leap probably owes more to the fact…
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Writing Is Hard
First, watch this: Hamlet 2 preview (pay special attention around the 49-second mark). Steve Coogan, playing Dana Marschz, beautifully captures the life of a writer in the overshadowed and under-acclaimed Hamlet 2 when he laments, “Oh my god, writing is…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Moviegoer
I just had another read of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, because I admire it and because I sought two specific paragraphs from the novel. I wanted to read them again. With our everydayness so saturated with news media and opinion…
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Pittsburgh, Writer’s Haven
“According to the Post-Gazette article, writers are realizing how great Pittsburgh is, and moving there en-masse. “Of course, the article makes clear, it’s not about the money (there is not much)—it’s about being able to attend Encyclopedia Destructica’s weekly ‘binding…
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The Apocalyptic Mythologies Of Steve Erickson
There is no place on earth like Los Angeles. But everyone knows this. Yet perhaps there is not a single place on earth where the end of the world will seem like just another fly-by-night off-off-Hollywood movie, screened in the…
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A History of Violence
In After the Fire a Small Still Voice, love is a difficult, vulnerable salvation—its troubled characters aren’t sure it’s worth the risk.
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Kerouac: American-French-Latino?
This account of a New York colloquium designed to highlight Jack Kerouac’s Québéqois roots has an odd turn at the end, in which the reporter calls attention to the fact that the confab was part of a series on Latino…
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Much Ado About Dust Jackets
A few days ago we highlighted an article about the current trend of books without dust jackets. In her latest column Allison Hoover Bartlett, author of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, takes us past the jacket/no jacket debate…
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L.A. on Fire
Nathanael West‘s The Day of the Locust tells the story of Tod Hackett, a painter trying to survive in Hollywood while planning his masterpiece, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” Hackett is surrounded by dubious characters: an actress as beautiful as…