Weird shit can happen when you’re far from home. To be clear, similar phenomena can also be experienced in your own backyard; still, there’s a long tradition of vacationers and expatriates making bad decisions while overseas. At their best, these stories can memorably evoke different forms of alienation; at their worst, they can play into alarming or nativist tropes.
In our morning reading: fiction from Eugene Lim, an interview with Robert Kloss, and more.
In our morning reading: a book from Björk, interviews with Jami Attenberg and Robert Kloss, and more.
In our morning reading: new writing by Babak Lakghomi, revisiting Deborah Levy, and more.
Given the amount of time that we spend in online spaces, it’s not surprising that many writers have sought to replicate the experience of social networks, text messaging, and shitposting in their prose. Finding a way to do it without stumbling along the way is a little more of a challenge. (There’s an early-2000s novel by one of my favorite writers where the evocation of texting felt so dissonant it took me out of the narrative.) And while many of us have been online for years or decades, it feels like it’s taken literature a little bit of time to catch up.
In our afternoon reading: new writing by Hillary Leftwich, Jeff Jackson and Meghan Lamb in conversation, and more.
A lot of writers were in bands when they were young, but what about making music after you’ve published a few novels and are old enough for the romance of late night shows in dive bars to have dimmed? Is it something most people outgrow for a reason? A compulsion related to arrested development or midlife crisis? Or is performance intimately related to the act of writing in ways that are slow to reveal themselves?
In our weekend reading: an interview with Isaac Fitzgerald, an interview with Meghan Lamb, and more.