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Join NOW!Tristan Foster interviews South African writer Ivan Vladislavić on the importance of art in his writing, having a large body of work, and the appeal (or lack of appeal) of cities: Our love for cities is always unrequited. Johannesburg is not an easy place to live: I’m deeply attached to it, and endlessly intrigued by its […]
...moreYet the more I imagined this scene, the more I had read between the novels of Bukowski’s lowly dredge through life and Dick’s mind-bending canon of science fiction, I began to see more and more of an affinity between the two. Both were working stiffs with a love of the word—Bukowski famously making his menial […]
...moreAny author writing about contemporary experience in their own country can be seen as providing some kind of historical record. Modiano, however, goes further. His oeuvre – upward of twenty novels, plus poetry, plays and children’s fiction – acts as commentary and analysis of the French post-war experience. Interviewed about his Nobel win, he says: […]
...moreIn September, we mentioned Dan Piepenbring’s essay on the artfulness of the Paris Review’s junk mail. Head to 3:AM Magazine for some more randomly-generated poetry, Michael Naghten Shanks’s Selected Spam Haikus, like this one: pull wealth out of your deep brown beans when they invite a oscillation.
...moreGood literature demands strong criticism, but today’s culture of niceness has limited critics. Lee Klein, writing in 3:AM Magazine, points out that writers’ interest in receiving positive feedback often leads them to forgo standards and slant reviews positively: Literary citizenship is about buying books, subscribing to lit mags, going to readings. It isn’t about offering […]
...more“The affect, here, stems from the naive individual’s skewed encounter with systems larger than himself, an encounter which, reprised again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that life should be reshaped into a self-repeating mechanism (it’s no coincidence that so much slapstick involves cars: in Bergson’s terms, automobiles are automatically funny).” At […]
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