In a video introduced by Paul Yoon, James Salter (who was recently interviewed by our own Sonya Chung) speaks about his time in France and his experience writing A Sport and a Pastime.
“You could say that the book [A Sport and a Pastime] is a long poem to provincial France.”
Zen State
Recommended Reading: Brett Elizabeth Jenkins’s poem “To Get to Zen” at Paper Darts. “you must first lose your/shit in an elevator/in front of a man you do not know.”
The Declining Agony of Influence
According to a study cited in The Guardian, contemporary authors are less likely to be influenced by classic literature than previous generations of writers.
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Publication Studio Does NYC
Portland-based Publication Studio is hosting a whirlwind series of events in New York next week. They kick off the weekend with an evening mixer at the Museum of Modern Art on Thursday, April 19; continue with a conversation between landscape architect Diana Balmori and PS co-founder Matthew Stadler at Printed Matter, on Friday, April 20th; and end with a lavish sit-down dinner, cooked by Ben Walmer of the Highlands Dinner Club in the Harlem speakeasy where HDC got its start, on Saturday, April 21.
A Critic Turned Novelist
“Sometimes I think I’ve lost my nerve a little bit. I think it’s growing older, and a certain reservoir of anger literally runs out.” The Guardian interviews James Wood, author and book critic at The New Yorker, about his craft, his forthcoming novel Upstate, and the landscape of today’s literary criticism. Pair with: an essay about the greatness (and great influence) of Wood on a fellow novelist.
A Quality of Immortality
“When watching [Abbas] Kiarostami films, one also has a great sense of another kind of freedom not found in Hollywood movies, nor in most European art films: freedom from the creeping realization that a film we are watching was made by a cynical shit or a self-deluded megalomaniac.” Here’s something you don’t see every day — an essay that begins with an Independence Day showing of The Purge: Election Year, and somehow ends up at a poetic examination of Kiarostami’s artistic legacy.
O. Brisky’s Book Sale
A friend of the late O.J. Brisky – longtime proprietor of Micanopy, Florida’s O. Brisky Books – is in the process of selling 100,000 of the man’s books, many of them rare.