LitKicks has been inviting poets to submit their work for public review and response since 2001. 2008 was a lively year for “Action Poetry” — a few writers have become new regulars, and many excellent newcomers have dropped in as well. We hope regulars and newcomers will keep up the good work in 2009. Here is a random display of some of the best poems from 2008.
No time for a real post today, but I’d like to say farewell to a LitKicks favorite, the bitter absurdist Harold Pinter, who has died at the age of 78. Here are a couple of previous pieces about Harold Pinter:
1. I attended a preview screening of Revolutionary Road, the new Kate Winslet/Leonardo DiCaprio film based on a highly regarded 1961 novel by Richard Yates, along with a few friends who’d all loved the Richard Yates novel. They all hated the movie. Myself, I haven’t read the novel yet, so I can tell you how the film stands on its own. (I’m also reading the novel right now, so I may sound off on this topic again once …
Last Friday I “storytelled” at a Brooklyn storytelling event. The assigned theme was “gift”. Here’s a reasonable facsimile of what I said.
I began by describing the irony that I’d been asked to tell a story about gifts, because I hate gifts. I always seem to screw them up, both the giving and the getting. However (I explained to this patient crowd of North Brooklyn hipsters) I came up with three mini-stories about gifts, each of which portray a lesson I …
I don’t know if the intense Jeanette Winterson has written much book criticism before. But her review of Forrest Gander’s As a Friend in today’s New York Times Book Review reads like it’s her first time, and I mean that as a compliment. Rarely does a critic seem so eager to drink a book in, as when she tells us that Gander:
… returns words as meaning instead of blurring them as data. So much writing is just about conveying information, using …
In close proximity to primordial Florida swamps, branch-shrouded canopy roads, and Kafkaesque state capital intrigues, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer are Tallahassee’s greatest unnatural resource.
Ann is the fiction editor of Weird Tales Magazine, its continuing mission to publish brilliantly strange original material unavailable anywhere else. Jeff is on the cutting edge of the “New Weird,” infusing literary proficiency back into gothic fantasy and sci-fi with such novels as Veniss Underground, City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek, and most recently, Finch.
Together, Ann and Jeff have …
I’ll be appearing at an exciting storytelling event this Friday evening at Bar Matchless on 577 Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, starting at 8 pm. We’ve been asked to come up with stories upon the theme “gift”, and I’m puzzling over this right now (I bet the other storytellers — Tao Lin, Justin Taylor, Starlee Kine, DJ Dolack and Mac Montandon — are too). There will also be music by Prince Ruperts Drops, The Joints and (this should be …
Here are some recent books that have appealed to me, and might appeal to you:
A fictional account of Lou Salome’s acquaintances with Rainer Marie Rilke, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, inspired by the author’s own real-life family connection with Lou Salome.
It’s great to see these fascinating 19th Century thinkers mined for drama (and it’s interesting that a similar story is told in Irvin Yalom’s novel When …
Some readers objected when I scoffed at last week’s Holiday Issue of the New York Times Book Review and said “I’m not going to sit here reviewing a bunch of articles about coffee-table books”. Just to be clear: I did not mean to imply that expensive art books, picture books, gardening books and travel books should not exist, or should not be covered in the New York Times. I like coffee-table books myself, and have bought and enjoyed many over the years. …
One of my favorite spots in New York City has always been the Donnell Library on 53rd Street where Christopher Robin’s original most important five stuffed animals — a bear, a donkey, a kangaroo, a pig and a tiger — sit in a glass case. A recent Boing Boing post about the closing of the entire Donnell Library caused me to do some frantic Googling about the fate of the real-life Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, Kanga, Piglet and Tigger.
According …
