Starlite Terrace
Every fictional work set in L.A. begins with a slow crawl through its streets in the early hours of the morning right after sunrise. Maybe it’s always done this way to emphasize the vast sprawl of the city and highlight the loneliness of its inhabitants, or maybe it’s intended to emphasize that L.A., like New York, is ...
>
Weekend Reading: "Hothouse" by Boris Kachka
If you’re looking for a book to read this weekend, one worth checking out is Boris Kachka’s Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Coincidentally, my copy is supposed to arrive today, AND, more relevantly, ...
>
MatchBook is NOT a Dating Service for Readers
Amazon made a couple of announcements yesterday that, as Amazon announcements tend to do, set the book world atwitter. They announced the next version of the Kindle, but the news that really generated the headlines was the announcement of “MatchBook.”1 Amazon has unveiled a new US initiative to bundle print ...
>
Gunter Grass Rails on Facebook
This video of Gunter Grass talking about how “Facebook is shit” is amazing. Granted, it’s weird that I found out about this from a friend who found it on Facebook and that I’m probably going to share it on Facebook as well . . . But, I do totally agree with his sentiments and wish I could smash my ...
>
The Arabic Sterne?
Thanks to a Three Percent fan who sends me periodic updates on titles I’ve left out of the translation database, I just found out about Humphrey Davies’s first-ever English translation on of Leg over Leg by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq. Originally published in 1855, this sounds like the sort of crazy, ...
>
The Bridge Over the Neroch & Other Works
Not long ago, Nick Laird wrote an interesting article for The Guardian on the Slow Food Movement, an idea sprung from modern dissatisfaction with fast food. Participants gather to enjoy homemade meals cooked for as long as necessary. The emphasis is on the experience, not merely the consumption, of food. From this, Laird ...
>
Loving the Polish: Grzegorz Wróblewski's "Kopenhaga"
Recently I found out that, contrary to my past belief, I’m not 1/4 Polish, but 3/4 Polish (or Prussian, or whatever—most everywhere my family is from has changed hands over and over and over) and have since been on a bit of a Polish pride kick, mostly related to soccer players like Robert Lewandowski ...
>