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FEATURED ARTICLES FROM 2010
• A Murder and a Metaphor: Litkicks Mystery Spot #1
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Fiction

John Banville, the 20 Minute Guitar Solo and Truth in Fiction

by Levi Asher on Thursday, March 11, 2010 07:52 pm
Biography, Fiction, Lit-Crit, Postmodernism

... read more and add your thoughts (5 comments)



Little Known Literary Facts

by Levi Asher on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 09:28 am
Beat Generation, Classics, Eastern European, Fiction, Kid Lit, News, Southern, Television, Transgressive, Tributes

1, A font face captures Franz Kafka's handwriting, which turns out be rather pretty in a Kafkaesque sort of way.

2. Tablet Magazine interviews eternal Fug Tuli Kupferberg and points us to his excellent YouTube Channel. I love the audience participation in this little-known literary facts video, in which Tuli reveals that T. S. Eliot was Jewish, that Walt Whitman was heterosexual, that Homer's Iliad was actually written by a guy named Iliad, and that when Dylan Thomas drank himself to death his drink of choice was strawberry milkshakes. All true.

... read more and add your thoughts (5 comments)



Reality Hunger by David Shields

by Levi Asher on Monday, March 1, 2010 07:07 pm
Being A Writer, Biography, Existential, Fiction, Hiphop, Lit-Crit, Postmodernism, Reading, Reviews

Reality Hunger is a book-length essay about literature and culture by David Shields that's getting a lot of attention for its provocative key argument: we are wrong to think of fiction as the most exalted form of literature, because as readers we mostly value writings that bring us reality and truth -- which are, by strict definition, beyond the scope of fiction. Shields presents today's literary community as blind and confused, trained to pine after the ideal of the perfect novel, the sublime work of art, when in fact we crave something more primal than artistic excellence when we read.

... read more and add your thoughts (22 comments)



Reviewing the Review: February 28 2010

by Levi Asher on Sunday, February 28, 2010 10:48 am
Fiction, Lit-Crit, Music, New York Times Book Review, Sports

I've spent this weekend reading David Shields' exciting Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, a book that urges us to reject the notion that fiction is artistically or philosophically superior to nonfiction. This impressive book is empowering me to accept and embrace for the first time the dread and boredom I have always felt when I pick up a new issue of the New York Times Book Review and see a bunch of articles about novels and short story collections I've never heard of and have no clear use for.

... read more and add your thoughts (16 comments)



In Gatsby's Tracks: Locating the Valley of Ashes in a 1924 Photo

by Levi Asher on Thursday, February 25, 2010 06:57 pm
Fiction, History, Jazz Age, New York City, Polls and Questions

I'm really impressed that 104 of 148 commenters who guessed about the mystery literary photo I posted on Wednesday correctly identified The Great Gatsby as the novel in question. Four other novels that got some mentions were To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Reasonable guesses all, but the fact that the photo was taken in 1924 was the giveaway.

... read more and add your thoughts (11 comments)



A Murder and a Metaphor: Litkicks Mystery Spot #1

by Levi Asher on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 06:00 pm
Fiction, History, Polls and Questions

Can you identify the famous literary work represented in the photograph above? Here are a couple of hints:

• You have definitely read this novel. It's one of the most widely loved novels of all time.

• A person is killed, during one of the novel's climactic scenes, by the forked road near the top right of the photo.

... read more and add your thoughts (161 comments)



Reviewing the Review: February 21 2010

by Levi Asher on Sunday, February 21, 2010 01:40 pm
African-American, Fiction, Music, New York Times Book Review

Apparently the reputations of our acclaimed magazines have recently sunk to the depths of ignobility. William Vollmann, reviewing Ted Conover's The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today in the current New York Times Book Review, complains that Conover "occasionally seasons his prose with the flavor of a National Geographic article".

... read more and add your thoughts (4 comments)



Reviewing the Review: February 14 2010

by Levi Asher on Sunday, February 14, 2010 07:49 am
Fiction, Lit-Crit, New York Times Book Review, Postmodernism

I can't ever seem to get on board with the hot new young writers selected by our literary/critical/blogosphere group mind. I haven't gotten into Joseph O'Neill, or Marisha Pessl, or Junot Diaz, or Tower Wells, or Joshua Ferris. Is it my fault? Am I carrying too many prejudices with me, or not trying hard enough? Mark Sarvas recently seconded some comments Joshua Ferris made about readers or reviewers who don't like his latest work. Ferris said:

... they don't allow the book's rules to establish themselves before applying their own aesthetic criteria to it which I think is a mistake. I think a careful and adult reader allows the book to establish its world and then evaluates it on how well it does so.

... read more and add your thoughts (23 comments)



Reviewing the Review: February 7 2010

by Levi Asher on Sunday, February 7, 2010 11:33 am
Fiction, Film, New York Times Book Review, Postmodernism, Sports

Don DeLillo's been on my mind lately. I dug up his 1985 classic White Noise two weeks ago after finding my youngest daughter listening to an indie band called, of all things, Airborne Toxic Event. Rereading from the beginning, I was surprised how quickly White Noise drew me back in, how fresh, wise and witty this book was. Fun, even.

... read more and add your thoughts (2 comments)



Invisible by Paul Auster

by Meg Wise_Lawrence on Wednesday, February 3, 2010 04:30 pm
American, Existential, Fiction, French, Postmodernism, Reviews

In the prolific years since The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster's writing has tightened to such a perfect pitch it's become almost inaudible to human ears. His issues -- identity, language, truth or reality -- weave into such a seamless harmony, it must be what one hand clapping sounds like. He's even added, to this perfect mix, a hint of global awareness. It's beautiful mind candy, but what does it all amount to?

... read more and add your thoughts (2 comments)



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