September 19, 2013 Bulletin A Demand for Love By Justin Alvarez For the first time in its sixty-three-year history, the National Book Foundation has published longlists for each of its four award categories. The fiction longlist was announced this morning, and it features a range of celebrated and debut authors, including Thomas Pynchon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anthony Marra, and Paris Review contributor Rachel Kushner, for her latest novel, The Flamethrowers. Congratulations to all! On The Flamethrowers, Kushner writes in her essay from our Winter 2012 issue: As I wrote, events from my time, my life, began to echo those in the book, as if I were inside a game of call and response. While I wrote about ultraleft subversives, The Coming Insurrection, a book written by an anonymous French collective, was published in the United States, and its authors were arrested in France. As I wrote about riots, they were exploding in Greece. As I wrote about looting, it was rampant in London. The Occupy movement was born on the University of California campuses, and then reborn as a worldwide phenomenon, and by the time I needed to describe the effects of tear gas for a novel about the 1970s, all I had to do was watch live feeds from Oakland, California. … An appeal to images is a demand for love. We want something more than just their mute glory. We want them to give up a clue, a key, a way to cut open a space, cut into a register, locate a tone, without which the novelist is lost. It was with images that I began The Flamethrowers. By the time I finished, I found myself with a large stash. You can read an excerpt from The Flamethrowers here.
September 19, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Mike Royko By Clare Fentress “Whether one eats a cat or not is a personal choice, and I don’t want to sway anyone one way or another. But if you do, there is one obvious cooking tip: always remember to remove the bell from the cat’s collar before cooking.” —Mike Royko
September 19, 2013 On the Shelf Vladimir Nabokov’s Butterfly Drawings, and Other News By Justin Alvarez Booktryst highlights well-known lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly drawings. Has the Royal Hall from Beowulf been found? Archaeologists believe they now know the location of the hall where Hrothgar’s warriors once feasted. Cal O’Mara, Jerry Potts, Bob Lang: author D. W. Wilson lists the top ten absent fathers in literature. In feline book news, a cat procures the job title of “assistant librarian” at a Russian library. Perks include a raise in packs of cat food a month and “a spiffy bow tie.” “Well, that’s the end of the Booker Prize, then.”
September 18, 2013 First Person Not Weird About Brooklyn By Helen Rubinstein I had to put my leather loveseat up on Craigslist three times before someone answered the ad, and then that someone, in all of New York City, was the guy my closest friend had been sleeping with a few months earlier. I’d never met him, but I knew that he’d once had to leave her house late at night to go take some kind of medication, and that he got really, really sweaty during sex. Also that he didn’t have Internet access at home, kissed exclusively in chaste little pecks, and had two alarmingly close friends who were women. He and Marie were both writing novels about angels. They’d met at the university where they both taught writing and had both earned MFAs in fiction (at different times), and after they’d written together at a coffee shop one winter afternoon, they relocated to his kitchen table for what Marie called “the download”: a pre-hookup conversation about family and spirituality that lasted for hours. Read More
September 18, 2013 Quote Unquote The Sort of Thing That Would Be Difficult to Explain to Someone from Another Planet By Sadie Stein “Walter White is a bigger monster than anyone in Westeros.” —George R. R. Martin
September 18, 2013 Bull City Summer The Church of Baseball By Adam Sobsey Fireworks over the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. Photo: Kate Joyce On Saturday, the Bulls won the International League championship. They won the championship! We showed up to document them, and it’s as if they responded to the scrutiny, performed for the cameras. I can’t help thinking of the observer effect. Did we help cause this? The series was tied at one win apiece after the Bulls and the Pawtucket Red Sox split a pair of 2-1 games in Durham. The run deprivation bottomed out in game three at Pawtucket: neither team scored for an incredible thirteen innings. The futility (or great pitching, if you prefer) went on for nearly six hours. It was dazing and gripping, by turns, with blurry, barren stretches punctuated by a few dramatically thwarted rallies. Around midnight, it became clear that whoever won this game would go on to take the best-of-five series, for the blood would go right out of the loser of this marathon. Finally, in the fourteenth inning, the Bulls scored two runs—without getting a hit, naturally: Pawtucket coughed up two walks and two errors. Even though Durham closer Kirby Yates loaded the bases with two outs in the bottom of the fourteenth, there was no doubt he’d pitch out of the jam. A rousing strikeout on a full-count pitch ended the game and, essentially, the series. Read More