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     |  I’ve interviewed hundreds of bands and once, even, toured with a group. I sold their t-shirts up and down the West Coast. In that time I learned touring rock bands are mostly boring. I also learned the above story arc is never the case. Thirdly, I learned rock bands love cigarettes. Who knew? Continue reading From Stag Preston to Smoking Eyebrows: Why Rock Novels Rarely Work  Moby-Dick was a book that loomed large. I’d never read a book that long, and while I was just fine with reading Hawthorne and Poe, most of the other writers from the same period were work for me. I knew enough, however, to understand that when the National Merit Scholar told me Moby-Dick was “the Great American Novel,” the qualifier was a joke and not a joke. All novels are flawed to some degree. Continue reading Why I Wrote a New Moby Dick by John Minichillo  I think you’d like Turgenev. He is always ironic but he is gentler and less determinist than Chekhov. Sometimes in reading Chekhov’s stories I grow angry with him for not allowing his characters to escape or change. Chekhov’s way of seeing the world around him has a moral significance… Continue reading What Readers Know – Ed Haley and Victoria Patterson  My earliest memories of reading come in flashes of unassociated images and feelings: my father reading to me about a Cat in a Hat; my mother feeding me with Green Eggs and Ham; a book about a Giving Tree and one about a Very Hungry Caterpillar. Without even noticing, the Wild Rumpus had begun Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Eric D. Goodman  When I was in grad school they jokingly started calling me the “Edith Wharton of the O.C.” and one of my professors idly commented that I should write a House of Mirth for Newport Beach. He may or may not have been kidding, but the idea struck me and I ran with it. Continue reading Anti-Heroines of Those Vacant Ages I want to write reviews that are unclouded by my personal feelings for the publisher or the writer. Literary friendships feel fundamentally wrong to me, in the context of my wanting to be a serious reader (by which I don’t mean a reader of serious literature, but a person who reads books seriously), especially in that I want to review the books that I read. Continue reading I’d Rather Be Reading  My mom used to pay me a penny a page to read books over the summer. I was never the kind of kid who needed economic incentive to learn, but I have to admit it was a better summer job than bussing tables, mowing lawns, or working in the coal factory. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Aaron Goldfarb  I inhaled Hemingway that subsequent summer, finishing For Whom The Bell Tolls while on a family vacation to Yellowstone, knocking around with Nick Adams and Hemingway’s word-perfect short stories the following fall, and on and on through his oeuvre. During the next few years, I learned the difference between good Hemingway and bad Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Craig Lancaster  In my life as a reader, the first significant thing I remember is sitting on my dad’s lap listening to him reading The Hobbit to me. I don’t know how old I was; I must have been preliterate or just learning to read. It was a gorgeous book, a hefty hardback bound in dimpled earth-green leather that slid out of an earth-green leather box; both the book and the box were decorated with primitive borders and gilt runic inscriptions in one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented languages. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Benjamin Hale  I lived with my parents in Jackson Heights, Queens, and every morning, Monday through Friday, I put on a shirt and tie and rode the 7 train out to the Mid-Manhattan Library. Not the one from Ghostbusters, with the lions out front, but the other one, the smaller, grimier library across the street, where you could actually pull books off the shelves. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Matt Burgess Friend of the blog, Gina Frangello, tells me that LA crime writer Tod Goldberg (Fake Liar Cheat, Simplify, Other Resort Cities) is the funniest person she’s ever met, and watching this video which Goldberg made right before AWP, that’s not hard to believe. I peed my pants watching this thing. Something about the off-beat deadpan deliveries makes it even sadder and funnier. Continue reading How to Approach Potential Employers at AWP  When I’m talking with a customer about a book, I’m thinking to myself about three stories: the writer’s, the book’s, and the customer’s. The best outcome isn’t just that I make the sale, it’s that the customer likes the book enough to tell someone else about it. One bookseller can’t possibly sell every single copy of an author’s book. We can start the onversation about a book. At our best, booksellers are evangelists. Continue reading Why We Love What We Do – Geoffrey Jennings  I’m protective of myself as a writer. I’ve had to be, in order to keep writing. Focus, time, quiet, isolation, commitment, patience, effort—that’s what I need. FB, Twitter, and blogs are distractions. They can give the illusion that whatever a writer spits out needs to be read and noticed. Continue reading Victoria Patterson – One Writer’s Argument Against Facebook and Twitter  As I grew older, books continued to shape my life. Roald Dahl brought on fits of laughter. Diet for a New America made me a vegetarian for 10 years. Motherless Daughters reminded me that I’m not alone. Thoreau taught me that it’s okay to be alone sometimes. Jeanette Winterson reminded me that I have a heart that thumps and a brain that pulses. Faulkner made me pay attention to language and narrative and consciousness. Continue reading Why We Love What We Do: Emily Pullen  The Victorians were completely obsessed with death and mourning, and so even at Christmas, with all its emphasis on family, gift-giving, religion, etc., there was still this dark undercurrent. So holiday music for me is always a slightly moody affair, particularly since I don’t have too much use for the awful crap that gets blasted in malls and coffee shops this time of year. Continue reading Colin Dickey’s Holiday Playlist | |||
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