New Glarus Brewery, because when in Wisconsin…
[video]
awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:
Hunter S. Thompson and Bill Murray
This Tumblr (found via Peter Pawlick) makes me think of a favorite freakish pairing: Michael Jackson and Ariel Sharon.
(via peterpawlick)
“You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there’s been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it’s a way of life for them. It doesn’t mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book—if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don’t. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that’s otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn’t fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it’s not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading.” —
Philip Roth, The Paris Review (via lexi-gold)
This interview was published in 1984 - feels about right to point to it on this week of thinking about children and how they consume books.
RIP, Maurice Sendak
6 days left on the Kickstarter page.
The LA Times wrote a post today about the new Recommended Reading Kickstarter from Electric Literature:
The quarterly journal Electric Literature, which publishes simultaneously in print, ebook, iPhone and Kindle form, is always up for trying something new. It regularly invites animators to create short videos of single sentences from its stories, like the one above. And way back in 2009, it published a short story in tweets by Rick Moody on Twitter, an experiment that was only partially creatively successful but that earned it an important literary place in the Twittersphere. What does a quarterly do with 150,000 followers in the long months between publication? Editor Benjamin Samuel decided curation is the thing.
Hence, Recommended Reading. It’s a project that will publish one fiction story per week, with selections being made by a variety of readers who are in the know: an independent press, a writer, the kind folks at Electric Literature, and another literary journal. That’s one month, then the cycle starts again.
The project went up on Kickstarter in April and swiftly reached its $10,000 goal (aided in part by a donor perk of a really cool flask). The organizers now hope to raise double that goal, and have about $3,500 and less than a week to go. Samuel explained what to expect from Recommended Reading, via email.
All month long, we’ll be tweeting links to our favorite short stories under the hashtag #shortreads. What’s one of your favorite short stories?
Iowa City never changes.
br1gid: “Nathan Englander. He might be crazy, and I love him.”