First I will start with the facts, and then I’ll insert an embarrassing confession, just to keep things interesting. So here’s the facts: Erik Thompson is a local music writer. He writes for City Pages, The Line of Best Fit, This is Fake DIY, and he used to write for Culture Bully. Don’t worry, if that’s too much to take [...]
Every other week we are inundated with stories about the death of the novel and the book and the short story. On the opposite week we get stories about how someone is bringing it all back to life. Most of these stories are predicated on the idea that people don’t read anymore. Somewhere along the way reading got a bad [...]
There is only one thing to do while your boyfriend is part of a world-wide online project devoted to reading the book Infinite Jest over the course of three months: Pick up your own big fat book so you can sympathize with him when he mentions how his David Foster Wallace weighs down his backpack, and how he has 600 [...]
Yeah, I cannot deny that I’m pretty excited to have Jake Mohan writing for MN Reads. I first discovered Jake’s writing years ago on his personal blog The Dependent Clause. His writing is so good that I cyberstalked him at Reveille and Utne. But now, I won’t have to look too far to find his musing on literature. They’ll be [...]
Over at The Rake Max Ross interviews Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (which I will finish reading some day) and the fantastic collection of short stories Drown. Diaz will be in town Wednesday at 7:30 to give a lecture at the U’s Coffman Union Memorial Theater (more info). Girl Detective [...]
Yowza! Largehearted Boy found a site that’s made a Flannery O’Connor lecture and reading available. Now, you can listen to O’Connor read A Good Man is Hard to Find. I am downloading it now, and my heart is going pitter pat with anticipation of listening to her reading. Sweet! Rolling Stone has posted an excerpt from David Lipsky’s The Lost [...]
GalleyCat has an interview with Jeffrey Friedman director of “Howl” a movie about the life and times of poet Allen Ginsberg. When I was in college I memorized large chunks of the poem. So enamored with the poem that I named my fictional magazine for a magazine writing class Howl. Also, the Wikipedia entry for the Howl is endlessly fascinating. [...]
Paper Cuts has Neal Stephenson make playlist. Stephenson (the author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon and others) will read from his new novel Anathem at Barnes & Noble in the Galleria on Friday, September 26th. Check the MN Reads calendar for more information. To celebrate the electoral season Amazon’s Omnivoracious is building a readers map of the United States by listing [...]
Local writer Jake Mohan writes a beautiful piece on the death of David Foster Wallace for the Utne Reader. (also Harper’s has made a ton of his non-fiction pieces written for them available, including the piece that became the “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) (and another thing McSweeney’s has remembrances of Wallace on their front page which [...]
RIP David Foster Wallace. (Also in the LA Times). The bloggers at Amazon’s Omnivoracious share some DFW memories. Buzzfeed gathers a bunch of a links including videos and his Kenyon University speech. Poe’s “The Raven,” translated into 50s hipster. This is the awesome. Really. I love when my love of music collides with my love of books. Like, for instance, [...]
