1. S. A. Griffin, a Los Angeles poet, actor, beatnik and longtime friend of LitKicks, is going to be filling the shell of a bomb with pages of poetry and touring the USA with it in 2010.
History
by Levi Asher December 14th, 2009 5:14pm
1. S. A. Griffin, a Los Angeles poet, actor, beatnik and longtime friend of LitKicks, is going to be filling the shell of a bomb with pages of poetry and touring the USA with it in 2010.
It's a funny thing about book reviews. It's been documented by publishing industry researchers that a negative book review can sometimes bump sales as well as a positive one, and good writers have bemoaned the fact that a great review, even a great front cover review in the New York Times Book Review, might not help sales at all. Of course, publisher incompetence can help cause the latter situation, as was recently revealed in a rather shocking New York Magazine interview:
by Levi Asher November 21st, 2009 4:18pm
Ben Yagoda, author of a new book called Memoir: A History, recently caused a splash by declaring that fiction has been replaced by memoir as the most important literary form, that "when it comes to proving points and making cases, fiction's day is done".
by Levi Asher November 16th, 2009 4:15pm
(Note: This article continues our study of the individual volumes that make up Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time". "The Guermantes Way" is quite lengthy, consisting of two very large chapters, so we will cover each chapter in a separate piece.)
I've been walking around lately with a thick book called Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, and noticing the way people react when they see the title and the cover illustration of a bloody machete.
by Levi Asher October 11th, 2009 4:05pm
Well, isn't this awkward. This weekend's New York Times Book Review cover features Maureen Dowd's review of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, and I already read this article online and wrote a blog post about it six days ago. I didn't even know if was a Book Review article, and since it appeared over a week early I don't understand why it is.
by Levi Asher October 5th, 2009 11:21pm
My great-grandfather Elias Trichter was a Mason, a member of the Cambridge Lodge 622 of the Free and Accepted Masonic Guild of Brooklyn, New York. He died before I was born, but I inherited an elaborate plaque, titled MASONIC HISTORY and signed and stamped to commemorate his initiation as a Master Mason on February 21, 1910, witnessed by brothers Mortimer Carman, Howard J. Fitzpatrick and James A. Nixon.
Long ago I used to sit around on lazy days and read short stories by William Trevor, the august Irish author who turned 81 this year. I haven't sat around reading William Trevor for a long time, but a gentle review of his Love and Summer by Thomas Mallon in the latest New York Times Book Review leaves me yearning to rediscover that pleasure:
by Levi Asher August 31st, 2009 8:54pm
More books are published each year about the Internet's future than about its past. But it's not clear that readers who wish to better understand the paradigm changes of our time aren't better off with solid history than with ponderous trendspotting. I'd rather read a book with a story to tell than a book with guesses to make.
