Best album named after a Chinua Achebe novel. ♫ Things Fall Apart – The Roots http://t.co/kJQmG8A0K2 #Spotify
Bio: Jason Diamond is the founder of Vol. 1 Brooklyn. His work has been published by The Paris Review, NPR.Org, Tablet, the A.V. Club, and many other places. He's currently at work on a book, and can be found on Twitter @imjasondiamond.
But the show had to go on, and the event, part of a monthly series put on jointly by Congregation Beth Elohim and local indie The Community Bookstore, was a chance for many to gather and attempt to return to some sense of normalcy. The event, which promised DeLillo in conversation with Auster, as well as an introduction by another literary bigwig, Jonathan Safran Foer, was filled with more than 100 people. It was a refreshingly hightone event in a neighborhood that usually boasts more modest fare. And there was no exclusivity; everyone who could make it out, it seemed, got a seat. More
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on November 2nd, 2012 2:57pm“House For Sale” is the story of Franzen going back home to Missouri to take care of the house his recently deceased mother spent half of her life putting together; the house where Franzen himself was “the only person in the family who’d had a full childhood.” For House For Sale, Fish presents Franzen’s essay in the voices of five actors—Rob Campbell, Merritt Janson, Lisa Joyce, Christina Rouner, and Michael Rudko. Each is cued to read with special sets of lights that, when particular colored bulbs are illuminated, direct specific actors to read a section of the text. But, the playbill explains, the cues aren’t planned in advance; they are determined live so none of the actors know quite when they will be called on. More
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on October 24th, 2012 1:45pmCale tries to cram too much throughout the album’s 54 minutes. It almost seems like the “Shifty adventure” he’s referring to is the series of songs that shift back and forth, slow to mid-tempo; with some tracks sounding like Psychedelic Furs throwaways, while others (like the track “Hemingway”) almost sound like they can be related to contemporary bands like Yeasayer, just with a much older man holding the microphone. More
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on October 12th, 2012 2:15pmAs I waited around outside, two other older ladies, each with small, rectangular pieces of cardboard proclaiming that they, too, were looking for tickets, got into a bickering argument when a gentleman in an overcoat decided to give one of the women his spare ticket; the other woman exhibited the injured manner of one whose cab has been stolen. “Can you believe that?” the ticketless woman said repeatedly, to anyone who would listen, shaking her head in disgust. More
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on October 8th, 2012 12:27pmAlthough the term “Ivy” wasn’t used to describe the collection of elite colleges along the East Coast until 1933, Fitzgerald’s debut, along with Owen Johnson’s 1912 novel Stover at Yale, were the two novels of the early 20th century that best described life at the grand institutions of learning that we now call the Ivy League. The style that first developed on those campuses in the days of Stover and Blaine continues on to this day on runways from New York to Milan (not to mention the host of websites and forums for enthusiasts), yet this is the first exhibition of its kind. More
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on September 18th, 2012 10:45amAt last night's Selected Shorts event actress Lois Smith tackled Tóibín’s “A Priest in the Family,” and Tony Award-winning actor Richard Easton read Smith’s 2004 New Yorker- published short, “Hanwell in Hell,” with both authors on hand to chat about their respective pieces before the story readings and, presumably, to lend moral support to their respective literary interpreters. More
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on April 26th, 2012 4:19pmIn February, Xray Eyeballs released their second album, Splendor Squarlor, with Rabalais’ presence being one of the most noticeable changes—singing alongside San Felipe on nearly every song, adding a unique counterweight to his often off-kilter vocals. The leap from the band’s debut 2011 L.P., Not Nothing, is sizeable. Graduating from garage rock that sounded like it was more influenced by Robitussin than The Sonics, Splendor Squalor hones the formula, coming in like something between a latter-day John Carpenter soundtrack and New Order More
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on April 20th, 2012 3:02pmIt has to be disorienting to start something small with two other people, keep at it for 30 years and watch it grow into something huge, and then one day the other two decide to up and go their separate ways, and suddenly you’re middle-aged, unemployed, with the whole world of choices open to you. That’s an accurate summary of Lee Ranaldo’s life since the announcement that the other two founding members of his band, Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, were getting a divorce. He is now a man without a full-time gig, but also a guy with one of those resumes people call "overqualified." More
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on March 23rd, 2012 3:47pmSeeing Allen at the 92nd St. Y is the closest thing Manhattan has to seeing the Pope give a blessing in St. Peter's Square. And his followers come out in droves for the pilgrimage. The event, billed as a discussion about Allen's autobiographical 1987 film Radio Days, had been sold out for weeks, but there were still a large share of people standing outside hoping to score spare tickets. Of course, as can be the case at the 92Y, the actuality didn’t quite live up to the billing, and what transpired was a pleasant, if not quite razor-sharp discussion on the topic of nostalgia. More
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on February 22nd, 2012 5:22pmSince his best-selling debut short-story collection, For Relief of Unbearable Urges, came out in 1999, his name has been mentioned frequently among a generation of writers—Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith—who found their first success in the rosy pre-9/11 days, but were soon being relied upon to usher literature into a different era. Englander fits the mold as his generation’s New York Jewish storyteller, heir to Roth or Bellow, using Jewish characters and milieus in the way Updike played with WASP ones. When I mentioned this to him, he noted that he prefers a more simple designation, “It took me a long time to see that I’m just telling my stories," he said. "Jews with pride will say you’re a Jewish writer. Then a gentile would say you’re a Jewish writer, but it’s not fucking genre fiction.” More
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on January 25th, 2012 3:35pm
