Charles Bock (Beautiful Children), in a recent interview, sounding perturbed: “Where are you right now? I’m in a writer’s room in Manhattan. There’s all these other people with their fucking computers doing their stupid little bullshit. It feels pointless. You wanna feel like it matters. It’s hard to do that when you’re in a room like this. At least it’s quiet.”
Charles Bock Interviewed
The Man Group Drops Sponsorship of Asian Lit Prize
The Man Asian Prize is no more. Long live the Man Asian Prize.
●
●
Up with Me
If you’re an insomniac, you probably feel an odd kinship with people who work the night shift, especially if you live in a large city which is easy to explore on sleepless nights. At The Rumpus, Jess Lowry recalls her own late nights in Manhattan.
●
●
Navigating Past Nihilism
“Without any clear and agreed upon sense for what to be aiming at in a life, people may experience the paralyzing type of indecision depicted by T.S. Eliot in his famously vacillating character Prufrock; or they may feel, like the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, as though they are continuously waiting for something to become clear… or they may feel the kind of “stomach level sadness” that David Foster Wallace described…” Sean D. Kelly navigates past nihilism for the New York Times.
Science Genius
The Science Genius Initiative is a pilot project organized by Rap Genius, science teachers from ten New York City public schools, and GZA. Together, the group hopes “to change the way city teachers relate to minority students, drawing not just on hip-hop’s rhymes, but also on its social practices and values.” Indeed, as the Wu-Tang Clan emcee – who’s been working with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and MIT physicists for his new album – believes science is worth studying because it “unlocks the key to the universe, and the mysteries we don’t know.”
●
●
Tastes Like Nostalgia
“Titles hitting shelves in the coming months are both updating heirloom recipes for a modern age, and modern kitchens, and bringing untouched dishes back into the spotlight.” Publishers Weekly highlights the resurgence of retro cookbooks as well as upcoming titles that put contemporary spins on vintage recipes. From our archives: Hannah Gersen‘s list of literature masquerading as cookbook.
Overlooked Books of the Decade
The Daily Beast offers up a list of “the most overlooked reads of the past 10 years – none of which involve a wizard, a vampire, or a code” from John McGahern’s By the Lake to Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol.
“What they are, what they should be”
●
●