For your consideration: “A Minor,” (mp3) the first single from the emerging LA band Wake Up Lucid. If you like your contemporary rock rootsy, bluesy, and earnest (The Black Keys, Jet, The White Stripes), you might like Wake Up Lucid.
Wake Up Lucid
A Shared Vernacular
Year in Reading alum David L. Ulin writes about how books forged a bond between him and his father. “Books are, have always been, a shared vernacular between us.”
Please, Sir, I’d Like Some More Time
Recommended Reading: a piece from the New York Review of Books blog on modern attention spans and what they mean for literature. Hint: it's not looking too promising. Tim Parks closes with a prediction that "the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture, will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable."
To Go Boldly? What?
There are times when it’s a bad idea to wantonly split an infinitive. But there are other times, grammar Nazis, when it’s really okay to chill out.
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Visible Man
Want to reverse a book ban? Start giving away free copies of the novel at your bookstore. Earlier this week, we reported that Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was taken out of the Randolph County, NC school curriculum. But less than week later, the ban has already been lifted due to intense community backlash and a local bookstore undermining the decision. Board member Matthew Lambeth said, "I felt like I came to a conclusion too quickly."
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Hear what everyone has to say but don’t listen to anyone (except me).
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door author Etgar Keret shares “Ten Rules for Writers” with Rookie.
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