May 2012
16 posts
April 2012
18 posts
Faulkner + Stein = Peter Markus?
this guy writes the same thing over and over again, but a little different each time, so much like gertrude stein, cyclical, i’ve never encountered someone who does it quite like that, cyclical to the point of incantation - rural fixation, rumination, fish, rivers, mud, brothers, mothers, fathers, rusted nails, reading his prose is like falling asleep on a boat, rocking back and forth,...
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Books Are Magic: World Book Night & Basic Human...
Tonight, I handed out about 25 free books to strangers for the first inaugural World Book Night USA. I offered a teenager a copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. “What’s it about?” he asked.
“A woman who has cancer, and then her cells are used to make all sorts of scientific advances. Then the author tries to find that woman’s family and...
7 tags
An Impassioned Rant: In Defense of an Author's...
What makes me the saddest about this whole discussion of books, ebooks, and price is how the desire of the consumer (for low prices) devalues the hard work of the author. So many of the comments (which I’m not supposed to read) on mainstream articles on the topic make the utterly preposterous supposition that it costs nothing to produce an ebook — that when you take away the physical...
4 tags
“He never talked about his mother — and I had learned never to ask —...”
– - Karen Thompson Walker
galley edition of The Age of Miracles (Random House), due out June 26, 2012
Reminder to self
bookavore:
Don’t read the comments on New York Times articles about Amazon.
Don’t read the comments on New York Times articles about Amazon.
Don’t read the comments on New York Times articles about Amazon.
Don’t read the comments on New York Times articles about Amazon.
Don’t read the comments on New York Times articles about Amazon.
3 tags
“Raymond Chandler on Los Angeles: “A city no worse than others, a city rich...”
– The Long Goodbye
6 tags
DFW to D(squared)
From Anna Knoebel on The Outlet, the blog of Electric Literature.
“Among the many curiosities of this correspondence: “No offense intended” by the card’s image (a book cover from Sheldon Lord’s A Woman Must Love), the mention of Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker piece on William Gaddis, the brick shithouse of a palm tree, and a request to eyeball DeLillo’s “new novel” (Cosmopolis?). So many...
compassion & helplessness & hope & not knowing
sigh. thinking about how hard of a life it must be to be homeless, to be mentally ill. as i left the bookstore today, paramedics were tending to a homeless man who sleeps on our block every day. he had passed out, or was having a seizure, or something. he didn’t look good. i was so glad that the paramedics were there, that someone had called them, that someone was tending to him. but as i...
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