"Everything about her seems to be saying, Listen, if you don't look attentively, if you..."
"Everything about her seems to be saying, Listen, if you don't look attentively, if you don't go beyond my simplicity to detect the simmering volcano in me, you are not it."- Rawi Hage, Carnival
NOOK Snaps, a series of original, digital-only short stories...
NOOK Snaps, a series of original, digital-only short stories from Barnes & Noble, launches with a new story by Michael Dahlie, winner of the PEN/Hemingway award and author of the novels The Best of Youth and A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living.
In true Dahlie fashion, The Insurrectionist is a comedy of manners about a bumbling, insecure, but nevertheless endearing, American businessman in London.
Richard Russo has observed that Michael Dahlie, "writes the way Cary Grants used to act, that is, with a seeming effortlessness and grace that is truly maddening to those of us who know how difficult it is."
Chuck Palahniuk's Official Tumblr has existed for 365...
Chuck Palahniuk's Official Tumblr has existed for 365 days. Are you following it?
wordmeds: eat eat eat eat eat. Watch out for the parasite...
eat eat eat eat eat.
Watch out for the parasite hiding inside the pages of Irvine Welsh's novel Filth. It's insatiable.
"Italy is not a country for beginners."
"Italy is not a country for beginners."- Tim Parks, from Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo
Psychoanalysis as Literature: Stephen Grosz's "€˜The Examined Life"
Psychoanalysis as Literature: Stephen Grosz's "€˜The Examined Life":A psychoanalyst distilled 25 years and 50,000 hours of therapy into a slim volume, filled with details and moments worthy of the masters of fiction.
"Man's laws are self-serving, nature's laws are arbitrary, and God's laws, I..."
"Man's laws are self-serving, nature's laws are arbitrary, and God's laws, I proclaimed, are in need of some serious updates."- Fly, the taxi-driving, book-collecting, narrator/protagonist of Rawi Hage's novel Carnival
The Rumpus reviews Rawi Hage's New Novel, Carnival
"Fly's fantasies are inspired by his Babelian collection of books, "a library that contains the world, as the blind Argentinean would say", and Carnival itself is a love letter to stories and fictions….Fly is not only a wandering insect, collecting stray fares, but a little bug entrapped in a web of literature."
There are so many great lines in this book. We’ve been collecting some of our favorite quotes under the “rawi-hage-carnival” tag.
"Nothing is more obsolete than yesterday's vision of the future."
"Nothing is more obsolete than yesterday's vision of the future."- Tim Parks, from Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo
nprfreshair: Boston Globe reporters Kevin Cullen and Shelley...
Boston Globe reporters Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy spoke to Dave Davies about their biography of Boston organized crime legend Whitey Bulger:
Whitey talked about when he was 16 years old, he was in the back of a precinct house in South Boston, and he said a police officer jammed a gun in his mouth, and the police officer was leaning so close to him he could smell the liquor on his breath. Even at that tender age of 16, Whitey was clearly in the fast life, in the criminal life, and that sort of began that confrontational attitude he had with authority right there.
Image via WBUR, The Winter Hill neighborhood in Somerville, MA (North of Boston) was the headquarters and namesake of Bulger's gang.
Kevin Cullen (@GlobeCullen) and Shelley Murphy (@shelleymurph) are both covering the Whitey Bulger trial in Boston for the Boston Globe, continuing the story they've been breaking news on for the past twenty-five years. Their book on Boston's most notorious crime boss is "the definitive story of Whitey Bulger" (Michael Connelly).
Colleen Mondor, the longtime YA reviewer at Bookslut and...
Colleen Mondor, the longtime YA reviewer at Bookslut and Booklist, knows what she's talking about. Mark Slouka's powerful coming-of-age story will be available in early August but you can enter to win an advance copy of Brewster on Goodreads today.
nprfreshair: Author Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland, tells...
Author Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland, tells Terry Gross about realizing she was an anomaly in the 1970s San Francisco gay community:
I think from a young age I realized I was something different in this community because it was a community of young men, and here I was a little girl, and so I didn't see other little girls around. So I always felt different, but from an early age I sort of liked this difference: It meant I could get all the attention. There was no one like me, and I felt sort of special in a way. But I think on one level, as a straight child of a gay parent, I always felt like a little too straight for the gay community, but also a little too gay for the straight community. So you know, I think I felt a little bit ill at ease in either world.
Image of Abbot and her father, Steve, via The Boston Globe
Nicole Krauss on Travel vs. Vacation I'd always been set...
Nicole Krauss on Travel vs. Vacation
I'd always been set against beach vacations; they seemed indulgent, lazy, and uneducational. Now it dawned on me that they were all of those things, attractively so; that a vacation was something entirely different from traveling, or even taking a trip, which is what I had been doing all these years, first on my own, and then with my family. Traveling has always been about throwing myself into the unknown—an expansive intake of experience, a bracing and heightened exposure. At the bottom of my wanderlust is the hope that, freed of the ordinary, alert and alive to even the tiniest things, what I find in that other place will be revelatory enough to change me. But vacation—that was something else entirely. To want only to rest and recuperate, to be removed from it all, to enjoy oneself effortlessly—was that really too much to ask? What did I have against paradise?
On the train, we read. Sometimes I think I should have kept a...
On the train, we read.
Sometimes I think I should have kept a list of all the books I have read on trains. Certainly most of the books that have been important to me would be there. Perhaps I just read better on rails. A book has a better chance of getting through to me, particularly when I'm in a compartment, and at night. This hiss of metal on metal, the very slight swaying of the carriage, the feeling of being securely enclosed in a comfortable, well-lighted space while the world is flung by in glossy darkness outside, all this puts me in a mood to read, as if the material world had been suspended and I were entirely in the realm of the mind.
—from Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo by Tim Parks
(Photo by San Sharma on Flickr)
teslaandhispigeon: If you're looking for something to read you should look up Crime by Irvine Welsh...
If you're looking for something to read you should look up Crime by Irvine Welsh because I just finished it and holy shit it is amazing. Seriously.
Here you go: we looked it up for you.
The City of Poetry
The life I live,
The one I hoped
To live—
How seldom
They coincide.
Sometimes, briefly,
They do;
Sometimes, in the city.
—Gregory Orr, from “The City of Poetry” a poetic sequence in his new collection River Inside the River.
thelateparade: Author Copies 😝 Enter to win a copy of The Late...
Author Copies 😝
Enter to win a copy of The Late Parade on Goodreads. Packing peanuts not included.
"There is nothing like the cure of fresh air for cases of bladder infection, paranoia, and Cartesian..."
"There is nothing like the cure of fresh air for cases of bladder infection, paranoia, and Cartesian thinking."- Rawi Hage, Carnival
Andre Dubus III, The Amma of BEA While not as well known for...
Andre Dubus III, The Amma of BEA
While not as well known for hugging as Mata Amritanandamayi, Andre Dubus III gave plenty of hugs to his readers at BookExpo America today. Dubus was at the annual book industry conference signing advance copies of his forthcoming book Dirty Love (Oct.) already hailed by Kirkus as "first rate fiction by a dazzling talent."
FIORELLO LA GUARDIA V. ADOLF HITLER No one brought out Mayor La...
FIORELLO LA GUARDIA V. ADOLF HITLER
No one brought out Mayor La Guardia's histrionic eloquence quite like Der Fuehrer—or as La Guardia called him during a brief address in 1937, "that brown-shirted fanatic who is menacing the peace of the world." The German press responded with a string of vituperative, anti-Semitic slurs—calling the Little Flower a "well-poisoner," "Jewish ruffian," "scoundrel super-Jew," and "New York gangster-in-chief." The German Embassy then demanded that the State Department formally apologize for La Guardia's behavior!
Mason B. Williams rounds up the five titanic ego clashes that shaped New Deal New York. Williams's City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York is in stores now.
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