Want to get your book published? Move to Iceland. One in ten Icelanders will become published authors, which isn’t a big surprise because the country has a 99 percent literacy rate. Pair with: our essay on Icelandic writer Sjón.
Everyone Has a Book in Their Stomach
“A hustler wrote this?”
“The book documents its time, a time when homosexuality was illegal, and still described in medical books as a mental illness. It is one of the best firsthand accounts of what it was like to be gay in the mid-20th century — ostracized — separate from the mainstream world. It reveals, through its characters, how young men couldn't admit, even to themselves, that they were what society deemed perverted.” On the novel City of Night by John Rechy.
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Music for Thought
The moral conundrum that can be the white hip hop critic.
“Vague enough to be useful”
At Full-Stop, Nicholson Baker talks with David Burr Gerard about his new novel, Henry James and the envy he feels for Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. (Related: our own Bill Morris reviewed Baker's House of Holes.)
Grid World
“He is for the most part interested in documenting the sources of our unusual suffering, those initial shocks that brought about the trauma in the first place. Nothing ‘languishes listlessly’ in his music; all those slowly orbiting fragments are drawn back together in furious rotation, sucked inexorably in, towards a volatile core. The mood never stabilizes; madness reigns supreme.” This piece by Tom Regel at The Rumpus on realism in the work of DJ/Producer Flying Lotus is both thorough and convincing.
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