Sometimes I worry that New York changes too quickly. I find myself clinging to things, silly things I wouldn’t have imagined, like the Kentile Floors sign or Joe’s Superette. “Brooklyn as brand has overtaken Brooklyn as place,” I remember reading in the New York Observer months ago. So many people move to New York looking […]
...moreThe idea of avoiding a hangover was noble and practical and, as an avid drinker, held my interest. He pointed to a passel of jars in the corner. “Now, see those over there, they’re not filtered yet and need another run.” I asked about the numbers marked on the lids, and he told me it […]
...moreFor The Airship, Benjamin Welton looks at the legacy of anti-Asian bigotry in popular fiction over the last century, from Dr. Fu-Manchu to the racist work of Jack London.
...moreWhat does it take to transcend your medium into the stuff of literary value? Batman. 1986, the year both The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were first published, can be seen as a turning point for the comic book in America. Both titles defended the concept of comics as something more than low-brow entertainment. They […]
...moreClassic literature is neither timeless nor fundamental. Writing is bound by its place in history, both as we read it and as it was written, and the idea of a universal experience is simply another construct of the dominant culture, argues Eric Williams, over at The Airship: When we treat The Classics as preordained with […]
...moreLike 50 Shades of Grey? Why not try The Lover by Marguerite Duras? Freddie Moore at The Airship offers some suggestions for books you wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen reading to go along with your guilty pleasures.
...moreWriting and revising can be challenging under the best of circumstances, but imaging being unable to see the words on the page. At The Airship Daily, Tammy Ruggles writes about her life as a visually impaired writer: Before the computer age, the visually impaired could dictate their words to be set down in print or […]
...moreWho would’ve thunk it? Though WWII explains the Oompa Loompas. All the same, it’s hard to imagine Dahl, Ian Fleming, and William Stephenson as contemporaries, yet the three were apparently acquainted by the war. It’s usually macho men like Ernest Hemingway or Jack London whom people think of when someone mentions intrepid 20th century writers, […]
...morePeter Madsen: So where does this start? Brian: It starts with my moving from Long Island to Orlando, Florida. I wasn’t getting along with my immediate family, so I moved in with my grandpa and I started going to college. Then I met this guy at school. He pulls up in a Benz and he’s […]
...moreOften times readers dismiss graphic novels as too unrealistic to posses literary merit. That would be a mistake, argues Stefan A. Slater at The Airship, because reality isn’t inherently part of good story telling. Plenty of other fictional forms flaunt the rules of the naturalistic universe while retaining literary value, and graphic novels often contain […]
...moreWe recently linked to a till-then undiscovered interview with David Foster Wallace. See here for something on the music he loved.
...moreKey arrangement isn’t the only thing modern keyboards borrow from a bygone age. We get the term “shift key” from the way a Remington Model 2 Type-Writer physically shifted the printing bar between uppercase and lowercase. Uppercase and lowercase are themselves much older terms, referring to a 15th century method for keeping track of the […]
...moreThe phrase “little did she/he/they know” has plenty of history. The question is, when did it start being used for cheap suspense? The inversion of subject and verb sounds stilted and melodramatic, so the obvious culprit would be 19th century fiction. But perhaps not everything is as it seems. Once upon a time, in an […]
...moreThe title of “I am the Walrus” also nods emphatically to Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” — specifically to the walrus character, who expresses his remorse after devouring helpless oysters by crying at the poem’s end. Lennon confessed in an interview with Playboy that he felt they should have instead sided with the […]
...moreDrugs and petty crime landed Daniel Genis in prison for ten years. He spent his term reading and working on his three-hundred page novel—but only after dropping $375 on a clear plastic typewriter, the only model he was allowed. Genis spoke with The Airship, describing what it was like writing from prison: A typewriter contains […]
...moreThe Airship offers us a quick lesson on Korean literature with this brief introduction to three seminal works, by Heo Gyun, Kim Yujeong, and Kim Sungok, spanning the 16th to 20th centuries.
...moreIt has long been a favorite factoid of writers that Honoré de Balzac drank fifty cups of coffee a day. But is it true? The Airship’s Freddie Moore has put an admirable amount of research into investigating the claim, dividing coffee cups from demitasses and unhealthy doses of caffeine from fatal ones: I found one […]
...moreA seemingly unemployed wannabe poet, Stony secures the opportunity by winning the “Blast-Off Space Food” jingle contest and, despite confused protest from his mother, is whisked away to undergo an intensive, three-month astronautic crash course. Would you believe us if we told you the above quote describes the premise of a ’60s TV show that […]
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