I’m a fan of classic 90s New York Trilogy-era Auster. Many years ago I called City of Glass my number one favorite novel of all time, and though I’ve read many other great novels since I may still feel this …
Jazz composer and ethnomusicologist David Amram, a longtime friend of LitKicks who also happens to be one of the friendliest, least snobbish and most positive people I’ve ever met, is the Composer in Residence at the Democratic National Convention which begins tonight in Denver, Colorado.
This seems to have been inspired by Denver’s famous role as the spiritual vortex of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road as the hometown of main character Dean Moriarty, …
Middle East politics takes the cover of this weekend’s New York Times Book Review. Kenneth Pollack, a so-called liberal intellectual from the Brookings Institution who urged the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2002 before apologizing for this bad call quickly after, has now written A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, and critic Max Rodenbeck has no intention of letting Pollack off easy. Rodenbeck hammers Pollack’s simplistic interventionist strategy to shards, and it’s …
1. Let’s just start out with the awesome, shall we? A little tour through Vincent Price’s cookbook. “There is nothing more soul-satisfying than the first succulent bite into the juicy frankfurter,” according to dear Vince. Nothing.
2. Quick: how many poem-based films can you think of? How about The Set-Up? The Hudson Review examines this one in depth.
3. Speaking of literary films, did you know that a Scranton native’s book on Tolstoy is being turned into a film? Now you do. You’re …
Today we celebrate Dzanc’s publication of Best of the Web 2008 with a guest post by Benjamin Buchholz, whose blog writing combines culinary and military inspirations. — EditorsWriting a post for a food blog has proved an interesting challenge. Most of my work concerns war, trauma, and the changes wrought by war on young men and women. My culinary abilities extend only in a very limited direction toward the barbeque grill and frozen pizza. …
Hello, LitKicks. This week you’re stuck with me. Let’s have a kegger.
Okay, just kidding. But only because I’m too lazy to figure out the logistics of such a thing.
Anyway, fellow bibliophiles, I have been thinking about books lately. I know this seems obvious, so to be more specific, I was thinking about books themselves, those bound paper things sitting on my shelves. I love my books, and I read some of them over and over until they are falling apart, but even though I have …
One of the best things critics can do is complete the thoughts we struggle to formulate ourselves when we read new books. I balked at buying James Wood’s literary study How Fiction Works recently after reading several pages in a bookstore, sensing that I might find the air too rarefied. After reading Walter Kirn’s consideration of the book on the cover of this week’s New York Times Book Review, I feel better about this tough decision.
Kirn appears to be both impressed and …
Oh well. The New York Times gives this Hair …
When I’m wrong about something, I’ll admit it. I called Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader a loser last year — not because I don’t believe in e-books, but because the device is too expensive and too big. Amazon has refused to release sales figures for the Kindle (which would seem like further evidence that it’s not taking off with consumers) but now TechCrunch is reporting that they’ve sold 240,000 units (based on information from “a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge …
The best poetry slam I’ve been to this year was in a room full of Alzheimer’s patients at the East 80th Street Residence in New York City.
I sat in a circle with more than twenty senior citizens, all of them suffering from moderate to severe memory loss and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s or Alzheimer’s-related disease, watching spoken-word poet Gary Mex Glazner work the crowd. Before beginning, he walked the circle, looking deeply into the eyes of each attendee and clasping their hands. …
