A roundup of things consumed by our contributors. Jason Diamond I went to Walton Ford’s opening at the Paul Kasmin Gallery a month or so ago, and became pretty obsessed with his work. I guess I’m including this because the exhibition closes on December 23rd, and if you’re in New York, I want you all to see it.
If Britpop ran the publishing industry…
Posted by Jason Diamond Jarvis Cocker becoming an editor at Faber & Faber is a step in the right direction, but these are my dream scenarios if Britpoppers from the 1990s ran the publishing industry. 1. Penguin would hire Morrissey to be in charge of design of the Classics imprint. They’re already going to be giving him bags of cash to write his memoirs, why not put Moz in charge of getting things back to the level that Germano Facetti […]
Reviewed: Close to Jedenew by Kevin Vennemann
Posted by Tobias Carroll Kevin Vennemann, Close to Jedenew translated by Ross Benjamin Melville House, 2010 130 p. The first line of Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew is “We do not breathe.” That first-person plural continues throughout the novel, Vennemann’s first following a collection of shorter works. It’s an appropriate choice, given his focus on groups, on associations and affiliations, some continuously shifting and some permanent. His setting here is Poland in the late 1930s, on the eve of being […]
Jonathan Safran Foer is Officially Annoying
And he’s got a Moby Award to prove it! Mazel tov brosef!
Israeli Novel Wins Best Translation Award
The news that The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven won the 2010 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction, is cool for a few reasons other than the obvious fact that it’s a great book, and deserving of a cool award. 1. It’s always good when translated material gets recognized. 2. The book is on Melville House, and we love Melville House. 3. That’s all.
Reviewed: Lucinella by Lore Segal
Lucinella by Lore Segal Melville House (reissued 2009), 154 p. It begins as a comedy of manners among writers: the protagonist Lucinella spending time at Yaddo amidst a succession of shifting relationships and fluctuating power dynamics. You could be forgiven for having a sense of how the story will proceed. Lore Segal’s Lucinella was originally published in 1976 and, as it proceeds, one might find it closer kin to John Barth’s Chimera than a more straightforward tale of life and […]
Best of 2009: Books
Tobias Carroll’s picks Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler AM/PM by Amelia Gray Lowboy by John Wray The Other City by Michal Ajvaz Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson Between Jan Elizabeth Watson’s novel of a brother and sister raised in isolation and Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, this was a good year for novels evoking childhood. Both Watson and Whitehead deftly suggest their narrators’ adult destinies with a few […]
Bites: Mobycons, Gaiman’s Twitter, The Road, Bo Diddley’s beat, and more
Some guy at NYU “intends to turn all 6,438 sentences of the great Herman Melville (Moby-Dick)opus into Japanese Emoji, rather picturesque emoticons that are on most handsets in Japan.” Lit. Lit Drift talks about Neil Gaiman’s Twitter fiction contest. Melville House named best small press of the year! Maud Newton talks R. Crumb and Chick tract’s. Featherproof Books has an iPhone app. (thanks The Scowl) The Millions gives us a comedic translation of The Road. L Magazine talks to writer […]