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Books
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Books, Comics
In Comics: 3 Short Reviews
(All of these were picked up at MoCCA earlier in the month.)
James Hindle, Little Wolves
Cecil Berry, the protagonist of Little Wolves, is a children’s book author in the midst of a creative drought. A thumbnail description of Little Wolves would be to call it his search for inspiration, but that’s a little too neat. [...] -
Books, Film
Etgar Keret on Film
Last week, I interviewed the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, with a focus on his work for film. One bit:
Has working as a director affected how you have adapted your work for the screen?
I usually prefer not to adapt my stories. An adaptation is a reading of a text and a writer’s reading is [...] -
Books, Comics
MoCCA 2010
Yesterday, I made my way to the MoCCA Festival for the first time in many, many years. (For context: the last time I was there, Craig Thompson’s Blankets was brand-new and Bryan O’Malley’s Lost at Sea was this close to coming out.) Here’s what I ended up getting while there; ah, commerce.
Simon Gärdenfors, The 120 [...]
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Books
On Memoirs, Siblings, & Limitations
Not long ago, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Beautiful Struggle and Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography back-to-back. I know Sampsell largely through his fiction — short, sometimes jarring, oftentimes sexually charged — and via his role as publisher of Future Tense Publishing. I came to Coates’s memoir as a reader of his work at The [...]
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Books
Classes & Sentences
Earlier this month, I attended one of the New York-based Dzanc Day classes, headed by Dawn Raffel and Pamela Ryder. The class was very helpful, I’d say, for many reasons; the topics discussed here have helped me get past a section of a novella-in-progress that had been holding me up for the better part of [...]
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Books
LaValle/Newton
Made my way to Greenlight this evening for a conversation between Victor LaValle and Maud Newton, held in part due to the recent paperback release of the former’s novel Big Machine. The discussion between the two, preceded by a reading, was enjoyable — it achieved a good balance between casual conversation and deeper explorations of [...]
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Books, Comics
Vampires (what do not sparkle)
I’ve been a fan of Scott Snyder’s writing ever since we took part in a Dollar Store Show reading at McNally Jackson a few years ago. His collection Voodoo Heart is highly recommended — Snyder understands and deconstructs irrational male anger with empathy and precision. Nowadays, Snyder has a Vertigo series in collaboration with artist [...]
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Books
Writers + Interviews
Last year, I interviewed the writer and editor Matt Bell; it’s worth mentioning that he has a minibook titled Wolf Parts now available for pre-order. It’s described as “a dark, fragmentary retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in forty short fictions.” I have indeed ponied up my eight dollars.
I also interviewed Kieron [...] -
Books
Lulu Redux
Following an earlier post about self-publishing, I’d now like to direct your attention to the news that John Edgar Wideman* has opted to release his next book, a collection titled Briefs, via Lulu. Consider me curious as to how it works out. I’m inherently skeptical of retail exclusives, and Lulu is — as far as [...]
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Books
Justin Taylor Post No.3
Not long ago, I waxed ecstatic on the subject of Justin Taylor. In that spirit, I’d like to draw your attention to two more interviews with that selfsame author: Edward Champion’s, as the 323rd installment of the Bat Segundo Show, and Justin Taylor’s, for the cultural site Jewcy.
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Books
Justin Taylor and “The End of History”
Last week, I reviewed Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever for Vol. 1:
Halfway through “Estrellas y Rascacielos,” the third story in Justin Taylor’s collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, there’s an exchange of dialogue that’s at once unexpected and critically important to what [...] -
Books
Self-Publishing: Two Takes
This week on The Rumpus featured a Steve Almond essay laying out his rationale for self-publishing two books that wouldn’t easily be categorized. Almond also discusses his practice of only selling them at readings, and the result of that:
[T]he weirdest part was that I sold out at every reading. I’d love to believe that [...] -
Books, Film
Literary Adaptations, Science Fiction Division
One: At io9, an interview with Joh Alan Simon, the writer/director of an upcoming adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth. (With a Robyn Hitchcock soundtrack, no less.)
Two: At Bleeding Cool, Adi Tantimedh discusses the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s work on science fiction. While I don’t agree with his take on the Soderbergh adaptation [...] -
Book Review, Books
Horses + Jello.
I reviewed Matthew Simmons’s A Jello Horse for Vol.1. Here’s a bit of it:
This mundane surrealism contrasts with a more vivid dreamlike imagery that arises throughout the novel in intervals, sometimes as a result of slumber, sometimes arising out of hallucinations. It serves as a bridge between the protagonist’s childhood and his restless twenties, and [...] -
Books, Music
In Which Anything is Done
Interesting piece from Warren Ellis on the process of creating his Do Anything columns, complete with sample scanned notebook page.
I’ve enjoyed these a lot — essentially, meditations on assorted facets of comics, music, art, and culture in general,with Jack Kirby as a starting point. This one is a particular favorite, and includes some best-music-of-2009 thoughts [...]
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the scowl
Tobias Carroll lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has covered music and books for a number of publications, and his fiction has appeared in THE2NDHAND, 3:AM, Word Riot, and as part of Featherproof Books' "Light Reading" series. He is presently working on multiple projects of varying lengths.
