“Seaquence is an experiment in musical composition. Adopting a biological metaphor, you can create and combine musical lifeforms resulting in an organic, dynamic composition.”
Biological Music
Interview with Pinckney Benedict
At The Rumpus, an engaging interview with Pinckney Benedict, author of Town Smokes and Miracle Boy and Other Stories, and one-time writing apprentice under Joyce Carol Oates.
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A Memory, Deconstructed
In Johns Hopkins Magazine, a remembrance of the Languages of Criticism and Sciences of Man Symposium, which brought together Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, among others. About Derrida, Professor Richard Macksey (whose library you may have seen) recalls: “I’m not sure we were clear about where this guy was going.”
Smells Like Teen Spirit
“APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land,/we’re graduating in may/do we seriously still have to do the reading/theres like three weeks left you cant be serious.” You know T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” but have you read Mallory Ortberg’s “The Teenage Wasteland” at The Toast?
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We Have the Technology
At The Awl, James S. Murphy goes in-depth on the Stony Brook study, which I wrote about last week, that identified characteristics of historically successful books. In making a point about the publishing industry, he references the sale of our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel.
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‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ Turns 50
Fifty years after the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness, Charlie Jane Anders reflects on the "guidebook to a place I desperately wanted to visit but never knew how to reach."
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Katherine Mansfield: Book Reviewer
In a short biographical piece for Open Letters Monthly, Sam Sacks writes about the book reviewing career of Katherine Mansfield and the ways in which it “helped her build the writing muscles needed” to finish her masterful short stories. While some critics might take umbrage at the way Sacks characterizes Mansfield as “turning out deadline copy like an ink-stained Fleet Street hack,” his look into her reviews culminates in the realization that “the point [of reviewing books] is not to be constructive but to construct something of lasting value in the little space and little time you’re granted. Like all writing, it should be a passion, not a pastime. The point is to dazzle.”
The Resonating Work of Louise Meriwether
Looking back on Louise Meriwether's 1970 novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner, a nuanced portrait of African American life during the Great Depression.
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