“A brazen car”
Urban Homesteaders
Better late than never, here are eight great new books for Urban Homesteaders.
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The Experience of Being Human
Recommended Reading: Over at BOMB Magazine, Jesse Ball and Catherine Lacey discuss strategies for a non-interview, why they write, and poetry’s “direct utility toward experience.”
Joshua Cohen’s Epic
Joshua Cohen, author of the just-published meganovel Witz, dispenses provocations in The New York Observer: "The targets might be Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shalom Auslander... When I started this book, I wanted to sleep with their wives. By the time I finished, I wanted to sleep with their mothers."
Cormac McCopyEditor
Cormac McCarthy helped copy edit Lawrence M. Krauss's Quantum Man, a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman. But, seriously, can anyone prove it wasn't really McCarthy's Yelp review doppelgänger?
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Literary Map of Manhattan
An interactive literary map of Manhattan, at The New York Times Book Review: “Here’s where imaginary New Yorkers lived, worked, played, drank, walked and looked at ducks.” (via The Rumpus)
Fact and Fiction
"if I am going to set a novel in a real place, in a real time, I must get all the details right. I should not put a wall around Washington Square, start the Iraq War in 2005, or claim that maple trees bear acorns. This matters because it has to do with keeping faith with your readers. If you get something verifiable wrong, why should they believe you when you really are making things up?" Helen Benedict for Amazon Author Insights on finding the balance between research and imagination when writing fiction. (Full disclosure, Amazon helps us pay the bills around here!)
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Accounting For Taste
Accounting for taste: a Cambridge University psychologist has concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.” (via Book Bench)
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A Matter of Time
Does literature have to be timeless? Over at Electric Literature, Kevin Pickard debates pop culture references in novels. Pair with Bill Morris’s Millions essay on books about the near future.
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