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Nobody asked me, but here are my 5 albums of 2016, in no particular order: A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, Sturgill Simpson We Got It From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service, A Tribe Called Quest Sunlit Youth, Local Natives 22, A Million, Bon Iver Since subscribing to an unlimited service, […]
My review of Julio Cortázar’s Save Twilight: Poems (from City Lights Books) is up at Literal Magazine. It should be the first in a multiple reviews for Literal, where I have been given the opportunity to regularly write on Latin American and/or Spanish language literature. If you know me, you know I’ve been a longtime fan of […]
Go read something by Dana Spiotta. You can’t go wrong. I’d recommend Stone Arabia or her newest, Innocents and Others. Otherwise, what you’ve been reading about Zero K is pretty much spot on, but the best novel of the year—which I am reviewing soon—might just be Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.
As I’ve been mostly working on fiction lately, I’ve not been as active in my book reviewing. But I’ve still been reading—of course—so I thought I might make it a regular part of this blog to round-up some of the better books I’ve come across. The bulk of my reading lately has been as a committee […]
This has become a yearly tradition—joining the chorus of book lists to toss in my thoughts on the great books published this past year that I was able to read this past year. In 2014 I enjoyed Amy Bloom’s Lucky Us, among others, and the year before it was The Infatuations by Javier Marías that topped my list. For more explanation about […]
As I’m always looking for recommendations myself, I thought I would post up a few things art-wise that I’ve been enjoying lately. I’ll probably make this a series. Reading Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell The stories “Opa-Locka,” “The Isle of Youth,” and “Antarctica,” from Laura van den Berg’s […]
Enigmatic—and brilliant—writer James Salter has died. Invariably, the obituaries and online remembrances call him a “writer’s writer” and point to his reverential, if small, following. That is probably true. It’s ironic, then, that Salter’s true gift was how he was able to encompass the entire human experience. A couple years ago I first encountered Salter in reviewing […]
Once again, Jon Ronson delivers. This time it’s “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life”: Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried […]
Quietly—at least I didn’t see much in the way of splash on it—Amazon introduced its equivalent to Apple’s iTunes Family Sharing, Kindle Family Library.KFL allows you to share content between linked Amazon devices. From what I could find on a few web searches, it seemed to be limited to Kindles—but there appears to be a […]
As I have mentioned before, my first short story to see the light of publication (outside of student publications), “At the Turn,” was accepted by Palooka Magazine. Having just finished looking through all of the proofs, it’s sort of hitting me now that it’s actually coming out. Although I’ve been writing fiction off and on […]