May 2011
30 posts
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
Esquire: The 75 Books Every Man Should Read →
libraryland:
An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published. How many have you read?
This list includes only one female author. I mean, I guess no one goes to Esquire listicles expecting thoughtful criticism, but good god.
1 tag
Your Week at McNally J
Monday? NPR’s Brooke Gladstone will discuss The Influencing Machine, her work of graphic nonfiction (by which I mean it’s illustrated and in panels, not, you know, PG-13) about the media. Maybe you’ve been looking at some of the excerpts over on Slate, or maybe you haven’t but should be.
Tuesday? Tuesday we’ve got this impossible-to-catchily-name event for Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language...
2 tags
“I believe, at a very fundamental level, that words are electrical. The...”
– I know I’m late to the Deadwood game—six years late, I guess—but this 2005 New Yorker profile of the berserk genius David Milch is incredible. Quoted above is his explication of scene that is mostly two dudes yelling “cocksucker!” at each other’s faces.
“The internship, in Perlin’s estimation, functions less as a meaningful learning...”
– From Molly Fischer’s great review (read the whole thing—the last lines!) of Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation. Perlin is at the store at 7 to discuss the internship in America.
“Author and publisher Carmen Callil has withdrawn from the judging panel of the...”
– Today in unpleasant things, Philip Roth, sitting on your face. (Via Eric.)
“Readings, discussion & reception with Europa editors; author Michele...”
– Housing Works: Events: Europa Turns (out) 100! Sponsored by Housing Works and McNally Jackson
Tonight at 7! Free! Books! Totes! Translation! Wine! Cheese! Authors! Translators!
(via housingworksbookstore)
theparisreview:
““…the idea of going to your desk for existential comfort, or at least some sort of a reason to get up every day, and also a reason for why it’s okay to get up every day or even desirable to get up every day—that idea makes sense to me. And if you could actually communicate that sense to your reader—if your book convinced them somehow, even temporarily, that it’s perhaps...
“From story to story or novel to novel the shapeless, nameless thing that I try...”
– The Paris Review let me interview Chris Adrian, a favorite since The Children’s Hospital blew the top of my head off. He reads here tonight at 7—you can ask him whatever questions I missed.
"For over two decades, she has been married to the... →
2 tags
“In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet...”
– Keith Gessen on Joseph Brodsky in the New Yorker.
1 tag
Your Week at McNJ
Monday? It’s one of our Conversations on Practice. Rebecca Goldstein is here to talk to Glen Kurtz about 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.
Tuesday? A great night: Chris Adrian reads The Great Night. If you’ve been in the store ever, probably at some point I tried to recommend The Children’s Hospital to you. 400 pages of angels and plagues and dead brothers and occasional...
katiebakes:
“And if Hemingway’s style at its purest owed a great deal to the simple word ‘and,’ Lipsyte’s sentences generate their coiled and sneaky power through its calculated absence.”
— Great essay by Philip Connors about Sam Lipsyte.
housingworksbookstore:
“Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books.”
— Kanye West
Kanye West does not care about book people.
“The stuff I’m writing about is so trivial that whether or not I’ve...”
– Geoff Dyer, after admitting that one of the anecdotes in Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Etc. was borrowed.
Woody Allen's top five books →
Catcher in the Rye! Of course. (via Ed)
Anonymous asked: Did Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield actually come to your store today? Because the rest of tumblr is very curious. Yeah.
“I like art with a visible string to the world.
In fiction, the war is between...”
– David Shields, from his piece “Life is Short; Art is Shorter” for the new LA Review of Books. Ah, yes, because fiction has nothing to do with “the world” and nothing to do with the author’s “own psyche.” That’s not how fiction works at all.
YOU ARE NUMBER ONE
zeketurner:
Girl three or four books into the twilight series
You beautiful redhead italian girl sitting diagonally across from me, a few books into twilight. We’ve never spoken, but you’ve watched me talk. You are number one I didn’t have the nerve to talk but I’d like to stay in touch with you, and i don’t want to wait six years.
All the found poem missed connections that are fit to print.
Your week at McNally J
Tonight? The McSweeney’s launch party explosion of funfestapolooza. Should be great.
Tuesday? More like snoozeday, am I right? Nothing.
Wednesday? Sloane “The Cros-town Bus” Crosley talks to Ed Park “and Recreation”—Crosley got her well-known nickname that I just made up for her because her essays are hilarious & winning, just like the crosstown bus! (In...
“Ooh, så kul att du tog dig till McNally! Kolla även Housing works, 126 Crosby...”
– Twitter
This has 3 of my favorite things: Support for McNally, support for Housing Works, and the opportunity to translate from the Swedish!
(via housingworksbookstore)
bokcafe!
“It’s like a big photocopy machine full of swords and glue.”
– The great Sam Anderson on our new Espresso Book Machine (and the week’s best sentences). We printed him a copy of George Saintsbury’s A History of English Prose Rhythm. 