Emma Rathbone’s debut novel, The Patterns of Paper Monsters, explores male teenage angst, conveying, not only, a palpable sense of frustration, anger, and apathy, but also the odd humor and stumbling insights, that can accompany the pain of maturation. Jack Palmer talks with the author about how she arrived at Juvie with a pissed-off protagonist, and, like, found his voice, and stuff. click through
Under a range of settings and circumstances, Marisa Silver’s characters are all grappling with how to be close to a lover, a parent, a child—accepting the obstacles and unpleasant emotions that come along with intimacy. Silver’s prose is gracefully simple, and its subtlety contrasts the complicated and abstract issues her stories explore. Risa Kahn speaks with the author about the themes of her new short story collection Alone With You—optimism, contradiction, love, and what it means to be close with someone.
Marisa Silver’s latest short story collection Alone With You aspires to provide a bigger picture of love—one that encompasses all relationships and transcends its various definitions. It’s a tall order to deliver—but the subtle yet complex portraits rendered here reveal the light touch and a steady hand of their author. For Risa Kahn’s interview click through.
Weaving through philosophical analysis, photojournalism, propaganda, quantum physics, and cyber-culture, Fred Ritchin’s recently reprinted 2008 book After Photography charts an effective path through the multifarious aspects of digital photography, illuminating a new world of spectacle as it emerges. Francesca Romeo explores.
Teddy Wayne’s first novel, which involves a Middle Eastern computer programmer’s move to New York City in the days before 9/11, is a work that is ripe with beauty and potential. Salvatore Pane deconstructs the superstructure.
Lady Caroline Blackwood may be best remembered for her marriages to painter Lucian Freud and poet Robert Lowell, but it is her career as a writer and critic that deserves our attention. Counterpoint’s expertly curated collection of her short stories and essays re-introduce readers to her strange and biting wit.
“The Novel: an Alternative History, Beginnings to 1600 is the first part of Steven Moore’s complete history of the prose narrative. Think of it as B.D.Q., or Before Don Quixote.” Justin McNeil delves into Moore’s comprehensive approach to prose’s varied roots.
In No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”, Kyle Gann tackles the experimental composer’s infamous “silent piece” with superb knowledge and skill. Gann happily answered my inquiries via email from Belgrade. Read on…
With wit and heart, Keith Lee Morris’s stories explore the slippery nature of memory, its mutability and incompleteness. His characters are forever filling in the blanks, and where others might have to earn our empathy, they have it straightaway.
The diction pops incessantly, and cuts like “Dear Aging Anarchist,” and “Sweet Spot” serve up a sense of rock ‘n’ roll poetics, brute and oblique. Like rock ‘n’ roll though, in Broder’s verse, wanton escape often loops back to the fears of the forbears, where freedom of choice comes at the cost of deep-seated disappointment.
As host of LA radio station KCRW’s Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt interviews the most well known writers of our time—but it is his empathetic reading of the writers’ work that has made the radio program, now in its 20th year, the premier literary forum in America. Read more…
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