By: Brendan Dublin's Wonderland Productions released a new audio recording of James Joyce's Dubliners, just in time for me to purchase a copy at Hodges Figgis during a visit to Ireland last month. It is an immersing audio experience with music and sound effects. You can listen to the audio trailer below and purchase a [...]
I had no intention of reading this book, let alone reviewing it, but a copy turned up at my local library. I started flipping through it and saw enough stuff that interested me to check it out. Off and on for about 30 years I've tried to get into the Allman Brothers, mainly the live album from the Fillmore East. It's a bonafide classic album with some great musicianship but, damn, I just can't get into those endless jams. It doesn't help that I once saw the Gregg Allman Band play a show with Stevie Ray Vaughan at The Pier [...]
BY ANDREW HERTZBERG At the beginning of 2013 I made two literary resolutions. 1. To read 52 books in 52 weeks. 2. To read books written by female , minority , LGBT, or non-American authors. The idea is not only to increase my reading consumption but to expand my literary comfort zone beyond books written by straight white males. So when I read the first page of T Cooper’s non-fiction Real Man Adventures on which, after quoting Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, he declares “I am a visible man. By all appearances white, middle-class, heterosexual. Male.” [...]
BY ANDREW HERTZBERG Hi! My name is Andrew, and I am a time being. I learned what a time being was from Naoko (Nao) Yasutani, a 16 year old Japanese girl whose diary washed up on the shore of a small town outside of Vancouver. It was found by Ruth, who is a character invented by Ruth Ozeki for her new novel A Tale For the Time Being . A time being is someone who lives in time: me, you, Nao, Ruth, Ozeki. Seems simple enough, doesn’t it? The book’s title [...]
BY ANDREW HERTZBERG The difficult thing to remember while reading There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself is that the subtitle is Love Stories. The collection of 17 short stories, recently translated from Russian and culled from 30 years of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's career, feature desperate characters in cramped spaces with unfulfilled hopes and dreams. As the absurdly specific and morbid title (and ironically titled stories such as "A Happy Ending") suggests, this is not a book to brighten your day. [...]
Published February 17, 2013 by Civil Coping Mechanisms Press. BY GINA MYERS In I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying , the nameless first-person n arrator suddenly becomes a father to his five-year-old son, a previously unknown consequence of a one night stand, after the boy’s mother dies. Through a string of separate but related stories that take place over the course of a year, the narrator struggles in this newfound relationship and every other relationship in his life. Comprised of 115 single-paragraph vignettes, the novel concisely captures the complexity of the human heart and delivers a moving tale [...]
Published February 17, 2013 by Civil Coping Mechanisms Press. BY GINA MYERS In I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying , the nameless first-person n arrator suddenly becomes a father to his five-year-old son, a previously unknown consequence of a one night stand, after the boy’s mother dies. Through a string of separate but related stories that take place over the course of a year, the narrator struggles in this newfound relationship and every other relationship in his life. Comprised of 115 single-paragraph vignettes, the novel concisely captures the complexity of the human heart and [...]
By Rosie Duffield February 28, 2013 They say you should never judge a book by its cover – and in this case it’s only partly true. Neon colours (and the Americanised spelling of humour - Ed) instantly attract your eye to Iain Ellis’s Brit Wits: A History of British Rock Humor; styled à la the Sex Pistols it immediately piques your interest and identifies itself as a music-related book worth perusing. Studying the use of humour in British music through the decades, Ellis gives a potted history of [...]
Red Doc> will be published by Alfred A. Knopf on March 11, 2013 BY GINA MYERS Throughout her career Anne Carson has published essays, translations, poems, criticism, opera, and prose, though perhaps her most well-known book is a novel-in-verse, Autobiography of Red . Published in 1998, Autobiography of Red was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a National Book Critics Award Finalist. It tells the story of Geryon, a winged red monster, as he comes [...]
Pow! by Mo Yan BY: ANDREW HERTZBERG Pow! is the most recently translated work by Chinese author and the 2012 Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan (莫言). His works are often compared to Central- and South-American magical realism and weave in the more surrealistic and folkloric aspects of literature into settings and characters based in contemporary reality. His works have also been compared to Kafka and he has cited Gunter Grass as a direct inspiration. The story itself involves Luo Xiaotong in two timelines: his upbringing [...]
Joy Ladin BY DAN FRIEDMAN Imagine you leave work one semester as a man but when you return to the classroom a few semesters later you are a wTRoman. Imagine trying to smile through this gender transition if you teach at a conservative religious institution where gender roles are clearly delineated. And, just for kicks, imagine what your second day would be like if your first day back at work at Yeshiva University Stern College for Women was heralded on the front page of the New York Daily Post with the [...]
Her will be published by Henry Holt & Co. on March 5, 2013 BY GINA MYERS Statistics show that fifty percent of twins die within two years of each other. Christa Parravani had to face this fact in 2006 at the age of 28 after her identical twin sister Cara died of a heroin overdose. Christa’s harrowing debut memoir Her, which will be published in March, charts her and Cara’s relationship from childhood through Cara’s rape, depression, self-destruction, and death to Christa’s own struggles with anorexia, [...]
Alan Light's The Holy or the Broken BY JORDAN MAINZER “Haaaaa-lle-luuuuuu-jahhhh. During the first few weeks of my Freshman year of college, a few people hanging out in my friend’s room starting singing the American Idol favorite. I can’t remember whether it was the Leonard Cohen original, or the Jeff Buckley or John Cale version or a medley of the three. All I remember is the odd, yet fitting mix of singing voices, some better than [...]
Heroines by Kate Zambreno By ANDREW HERTZBERG Let’s get the cliché out of the way: behind every great man is a great woman. In the history of well-known great men, rarely does that great woman have her chance to express her importance. In her new book Heroines , Kate Zambreno asserts that many of the extolled male writers, particularly from the Modernist era, have been overly-mythologized, that not only were these great women behind them, but that they were pushed unnecessarily far behind their beaus, [...]
A review of Bazillion Points's compilation of We Got Power! This is a content summary only. Click on the story to read the whole thing at InvisibleOranges.com
George Saunders BY CHRIS LILLIS MEATTO The short fiction of George Saunders has focused almost entirely on how to be a functioning person in contemporary society, and in Tenth of December , his latest collection, Saunders appears at his tender, moving best. The worlds here—his typical smallish, graying suburban strip-mall towns—are populated by characters who will also seem familiar to his readers: strivers hectored by financial hardship and Sisyphean home-lives; dreamy outcast kids assailed by ridicule; jargon-y corporate personalities; and in [...]
Joyce Carol Oates, Black Dahlia & White Rose BY KEITH MEATTO In the latest macabre, morbid, and masterful collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, one thing is clear: being a woman is hell, whether you’re a Hollywood starlet or a Jersey suburbanite, a teenager, a mother, a wife, a divorcee, or a widow. Throughout the book, female characters suffer relentlessly from betrayal, abandonment, neglect, trauma, and abuse, while their male counterparts are at best negligent, oblivious, and insensitive, and at worst lecherous, sadistic, and deadly. As a critique [...]
People usually associate the DC music scene with the legendary hardcore and post-punk bands on Dischord records: Minor Threat, Fugazi, Rites of Spring, etc. I lived in the capital city area for almost 20 years and while I loved the hardcore bands I always thought it was a shame that the music of the city was so pigeonholed. Most people were unaware that the music of chocolate city had evolved beyond the “Dischord sound." It was a vibrant place with bands exploring and mixing numerous genres and styles, and now a new book that explores those innovative and daring bands [...]
BY ANDREW HERTZBERG As a pre-teen and teenager in China in the 1960s, Li Kunwu (李昆武) both witnessed and participated in the great crimes for which the great nation is still paying today, including natural deforestation and wildlife genocides, blind obedience to a leader whose nationalism led to famine and mass starvation, and the youth's public humiliation of elders for adhering to reactionary, conservative, or traditional values. Now Li has teamed up with French writer Phillipe Ôtié to deliver A Chinese Life , a nearly 700 page autobiographical graphic novel. Li and Ôtié delve deep [...]
Guest Post By: Brendan Jami Attenberg has captured the zeitgeist in her heartbreaking and life-affirming novel, The Middlesteins. Edie Middlestein is eating herself to death and Attenberg shows us her sometimes sad life, and the ramifications of her decisions for herself and her family. Deftly hopping through time, we are situated not with the date [...]
Muruch
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Muso's Guide
INVISIBLE ORANGES - THE METAL MP3 BLOG
Side One: Track One
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The National – Graceless
