Featured Readers

Today in Shakespeare there was a girl wearing a leather jacket — the classic kind. It seemed promising to me, somehow. Black leather jackets used to be signifiers of rebellion. Then they became cliches. But now they’re so cliched, so obviously not rebellious, that it takes a certain courage and recklessness to wear one outside [...]

My College Radio Application

Dear mom and dad, I went to college from 1999-2003, where I lived, ate, breathed, and smoked college radio (WOBC-FM) all day every day. Then, with a year left, I dropped out to move to CA to work for a magazine. I worked there for the next eight years. Then I fell in love with [...]

Fatty

Hey Cutie! Well, if I’m not blogging, I don’t know who is… Best anagram for great is always Greta. I had to write this thing so I took care of other fake-important business and finally barnstormed my way out the house by maybe 1:15. Stopped at cafe number one, where my internet doesn’t work. Drank [...]

“Spilling Juice On Me Like You’ve Got Someplace To Go”

SHANNON: Can I borrow your yoga mat BETHANY: Keep your voice down, I don’t want those boys to know I do yoga SHANNON: What boys? Who cares? B: Yoga is a bourgeois activity. Also I feel like a girl doing yoga S: U are a girl B: I know TELEPROMPTER: Hey girls I’m a journalist [...]

“With a beard, St. Joseph; without, the Virgin Mary”

I began writing a comment on this post by Ed Park, where he politely disagreed with Jenny Davidson’s negative response to the style of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time – but after two Stella Artois and some Ryvita crackers, I’ve decided to host my thoughts here, in my own air-conditioned corner of [...]

oh shit

Sam Lipsyte: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus. This will be out in 2011. I don’t want to say that much about it. It’s too soon. But it has all the amazements we expect from Marcus in his construction of sentences and ideas, and then worlds more, all powered by a fantastic narrative. It’s a [...]

“Words Used as Words”

Unbelievably fun piece by Ed Park in Bookforum, on the invented sample quotations in the Chicago Manual of Style: It’s like glimpsing the surviving title cards for some legendary ruined silent movie. The non sequiturs cluster into miniature Ashbery poems (5.70: “One committee member may be from Ohio, another from Pennsylvania, and a third from [...]

Sonofavitch

Among the subplots Joshua Cohen cut from Witz: a Spinoza section, set in seventeenth century Netherlands; a section written entirely in transliterated Yiddish; a section written entirely in Hebrew (untransliterated, which is to say with Hebrew characters); a section set in (the nonexistent Jewish) Heaven, which I severed to form my previous novel, A Heaven [...]

Let This Hangover Be Not Wasted

I’m in a book club with a whole bunch of pseudonyms: Jeremiah’d, Paulie Groundphones, Li’l Broheim, Shampoosie, et al. Maybe their pseudonyms should be taken from the book we’re reading, instead of from the jovial thin air above, since the book is already populated by hundreds of perfectly named minor characters. But I’d want an [...]

David Mitchell

I realize that every literate person in the Anglophone world already knows the wonders of this book, but I need to report that reading Cloud Atlas on this bus this morning I nearly exploded. It gave me a full body high; I made myself suppress the sounds of several different types of pleasure (none of [...]