McNally Jackson Bookmongers

“Moby-Dick” has inspired many folks to do many things, from students who have pulled their hair out over it to landlubbers who have gone on sea adventures. Patrick Shea, an elementary-school teacher who lives in Brooklyn, has embarked on a singularly eccentric endeavor: over the past three years, he wrote one song for each of the book’s hundred and thirty-six chapters. He recorded them, posted them to his blog, and now he is performing them with his band, Call Me Ishmael, at a weekly residency at Pianos on Thursday nights this month. Each night has a different theme, and on March 8 the performances are devoted to songs about the ocean. The evening includes guests who will perform sea chanteys in the round as well as rousing instrumental surf rock. (Pianos, 158 Ludlow St. 212-505-3733. For more information, visit callmeishmael.org. Through March 29.)

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/events/above/call-me-ishmael-pianos#ixzz1oXToZaq7

Uh, guys?

Tonight’s event with Stephanie Vaughn and Tea Obreht has been canceled due to illness. We’re trying to reschedule. 

In happier news, our event with Eleanor “Up the Punx” Henderson has been rescheduled for Monday, March 12th.

jamiatt:

I wrote down a bunch of things Jonathan Franzen said at his reading at Tulane last night. Here is part of his response to a question about social networking:

“It’s a free country. People can do whatever they want within the law, and even some things not within the law…I personally was on Facebook for two weeks as part of a piece of journalism I was writing — it seemed sort of dumb to me. Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose…it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters…it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’…It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium.”

Read the complete post here.

“May I,” I asked with diffidence, “take a moment to acquaint myself with, and taste the qualities of, the most sterling and serious, and at the same time of course also the most read and most quickly acknowledged and purchased, reading matter? You would pledge me in high degree to unusual gratitude were you to be so extremely kind as to lay generously before me that book which, as certainly nobody can know precisely as only you yourself, has found the highest place in the estimation of the reading public, as well as that of the dreaded and thence doubtless flatteringly circumvented critics, and which furthermore has made them merry. You cannot conceive how keen I am to learn at once which of all these books or works of the pen piled high and put on show here is the favorite book in question, the sight of which in all probability, as I must most energetically suppose, will make me at once a joyous and enthusiastic purchaser. My longing to see the favorite author of the cultivated world and his admired, thunderously applauded masterpiece, and, as I said, probably also at once buy the same, aches and ripples through my every limb. May I most politely ask you to show me this most successful book, so that this desire, which has seized my entire being, may acknowledge itself gratified, and cease to trouble me?”

A Robert Walser character walks into a bookstore. He does not, after all that, buy the book. (From “The Walk,” which is in his Selected Stories, out out of print from NYRB (pronounced “nerb”).)

Diane Williams, Vicky Swanky is a Beauty

Alan Lightman, Mr g

Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

Leigh Stein, The Fallback Plan

Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory

Ivan Vladislavic, The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories

Nick Laird, The Impossibly

Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy (here tonight at 7pm!)

George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought

Alexis Smith, Glaciers

H.G. Adler, Panorama

Robert Walser, Berlin Stories

Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

And we are closed. Read the books you already own, browse some ebooks, and, today only, you have our blessing to go to Housing Works.

thedizzies:

General Liddament pondered this assertion for some seconds in resentful silence. He seemed to be considering porridge in all its aspects, bad as well as good. At last he came out with an unequivocal moral judgment.

“There ought to be porridge,” he said.

—Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

Books: We have them. You want them. Sometimes. Now is one of those times, because I am about to tell you what’s new and good.

In paperback:

• Blood, Bones & Butter: This is a memoir by the woman who runs Prune. Astaff pick of Douglas, hated by the serial commatariat.
• Open City: Teju Cole’s meandering novel about a man meandering through New York City.
• Leaving the Atocha Station: This isn’t new, but it remains great.
• Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy: Also not the newest, still one of the most interesting destinations on the internet.
• Conversations with Kafka: Franz!
• Ten Thousand Saints: The Lower East Side! Punks! Straight edge! The ’80s!
• Dukla: Dukla! Dustin says it’s “one of the most gently but singularly pointless novels I’ve read recently, is also one of the most satisfying.”

In hardcover:

• Life Sentences: Cranky old Gass’ baroque sentences are still the funnest to read, even when they don’t make all the sense.
• The Flame Alphabet: We’ve got signed copies of this, about language plague.
• Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty: Deb Olin Unferth, whom I trust, says that “Each page is like throwing open the window in an electrical storm—strange sky, air full of voltage, and inside, a square of brave.”

nyrbclassics:

Today is the publication date for Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, a collection of his early stories set in Berlin where he followed his elder brother in 1905, all in original translations by Susan Bernofsky. We thought we’d share the first story in the book, titled “Good Morning, Giantess!”:

It’s as if a giantess were shaking her curls and sticking one leg out of bed when—early in the morning, before even the electric trams are running, and driven by some duty or other—you venture out into the metropolis. Cold and white the streets lie there, like outstretched human arms; you trot along, rubbing your hands, and watch people coming out of the gates and doorways of their buildings, as though some impatient monster were spewing out warm, flaming saliva. You encounter eyes as you walk along like this: girls’ eyes and the eyes of men, mirthless and gay; legs are trotting behind and before you, and you too are legging along as best you can, gazing with your own eyes, glancing the same glances as everyone else. And each breast bears some somnolent secret, each head is haunted by some melancholy or inspiring thought. Splendid, splendid.

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