by | Oct 1, 2024 10:36 am | Comments (0)
Science writers Sadie Dingfelder and Carl Zimmer talk life without a“mind’s eye,” at Possible Futures.
Continue reading ‘Do We Know Each Other? Do We Know Ourselves?’
by | Sep 4, 2024 10:00 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery photo
Sam Carlson and Aug Stone.
“When we were, like, 15, 16, me and my best friend Trig used to go record shopping. And it was weird. Our local record store had this counter with all the cassettes behind it. The goods! You had to ask to see them,” a gregarious voice announces.“Trig was always after Buttery Cake Ass’s Live in Hungaria album. Week after week we’d ask, only to week after week be disappointed. Truth be told, Trig much more so than I. I didn’t know anything about Buttery Cake Ass. But that’s the beauty of music, of any sort of artistic creation — that another’s excitement for it can infect you like this.”
So begins The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass, a 2023 comic novel by Aug Stone about two record fanatics’ search for an album that may or may not exist. Inspired by a teenage prank back in the 1990s at Cutler’s Records and Tapes on Broadway, the novel has now extended its media presence — in a way that fits the theme of the novel itself — by becoming an audiobook, recorded at the Sans Serif studio on Chapel Street by the author, in character as someone else.
Continue reading ‘Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass, The Audiobook’
by | Aug 30, 2024 7:19 pm | Comments (0)
Brittany Menjivar photo
Friday Night Mixer
A Good Used Book
Los Angeles
August 23, 2024
Certified bibliophiles will know that there are two distinct varieties of used and rare bookstores. Some stock autographed copies and first editions that go for thousands of dollars. Others appeal to novelty seekers, carrying lesser-known paperbacks whose low prices belie their compelling contents. While I appreciate the preservational purpose of the former category (especially after my trip to a rare book convention earlier this year), my wallet is certainly grateful that A Good Used Book belongs to the latter. Lately, I’ve seen the Historic Filipinotown shop all over my Instagram feed — the booksellers are known for sharing pictures of customers with their new finds via Instagram Stories, the perfect formula for word-of-mouth hype in a city that can’t stop posting. On Friday, I stopped by their August mixer to scan the shelves — and, of course, pose for my own glamour shot.
by | Aug 30, 2024 10:22 am | Comments (0)
KATHRYN PARKMAN PHOTO
Madison Reyes & Spencer Henry sharing a morbid hot take with a guest in Tulsa.
Author Talk: “Obitchuary: The Big Hot Book Of Death“
Circle Cinema
Tulsa
August 15, 2024
Spencer Henry and Madison Reyes do not fear death. They laugh in its face. Last week at Circle Cinema, at least a hundred spooky nerds were laughing with them.
by | Aug 28, 2024 1:57 pm | Comments (0)
The History of Sound: Stories
By Ben Shattuck
Viking
July 9, 2024
306 pages
It’s ae long story. And 12 short stories.
Ben Shattuck tells those dozen stories in his new collection called The History of Sound. They stories span three centuries. They interconnect in pairs — sometimes in passing, through an old painting or field recording buried under floor boards, sometimes more directly in traveling back in time to reveal the full story of a mystery that has been reinterpreted and rewritten by later generations.
In the process, Shattuck is telling us one story, about our legend-laden region of New England. And about telling stories, period.
by | Aug 6, 2024 2:02 pm | Comments (0)
Brittany Menjivar
EC COMICS LAUNCH PARTY
Revenge Of
Los Angeles
July 23, 2024
It was a dark and stormy night when I discovered EC Comics. Perusing my college library’s bookstacks during a moment of procrastination, I came upon the graphic novels section and was struck by a series of spine-tingling spines: Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Shock SuspenStories, they screamed. This was around 2018, when the term “elevated horror” was on the rise — and with it, the idea that horror was historically a backwards, brutish genre that needed to be redirected. The comics I read in those volumes proved that this couldn’t have been further from the truth.
by | Jul 25, 2024 3:25 pm | Comments (0)
Paul Bass photo
Author Joshua Perry: Truth found in fiction.
Seraphim
By Joshua Perry
Melville House Publishing
262 pages
Ben is not Joshua.
Ben grew up in a college town in Massachusetts.
Joshua grew up in a college town in Connecticut — New Haven.
Ben is a fictional public defender seeking to extract moments of approximations of justice amid the crumbling court system in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Joshua was a real-life public defender struggling to extract moments of approximations of justice amid the crumbling court system in post-Katrina New Orleans. Now back in New Haven (working as the state’s solicitor general), Perry, 46, wrote a newly-published novel that details the quest of a public defender — Ben — to extract moments of approximations of justice amid the crumbling court system in post-Katrina New Orleans.
by | Jul 7, 2024 1:10 pm | Comments (0)
Frederick Noland
What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World
Dorothy Lazard
Heyday Books
by | Jun 21, 2024 3:05 pm | Comments (0)
CASSIDY MCCANTS PHOTO
The Great Tulsa Cookbook Swap
Mother Road Market
Tulsa
June 13, 2024
When I entered the Mother Road Market patio at 6 p.m. on a sweltering early summer evening for Magic City Books’ Great Tulsa Cookbook Swap, the book-packed tables and clusters of hungry readers-slash-chefs lining the west side of the bustling food hall almost felt like a mirage. A guitarist sang soft classics near the entryway, just higher in the mix than the low hum of the crowd. Beads of sweat glistened on my fellow swappers’ foreheads. It wasn’t just me.
Continue reading ‘One Part Cuisine, One Part Community, Mix, Repeat’
by | Jun 20, 2024 11:04 am | Comments (0)
Author Brill (at right): "If we understand how truth has been so eviscerated, we can see how to restore it."
The Death Of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed To Destroy Trust and Polarize the World — And What We Can Do About It
By Steven Brill
Alfred A. Knopf
Villains abound in Steven Brill’s new call to arms to rescue truth from internet disinformation agents and“pink slime” peddlers. My favorite villain is a piece of legislation.
by | Jun 14, 2024 10:38 am | Comments (0)
9TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE SAMUEL BECKETT SOCIETY
Cal State L.A.
Los Angeles
June 6 – 8, 2024
I was at the conference. I don’t know why I was there. After all, my knowledge of Samuel Beckett was somewhat limited. I had read some of the fragments, some of the early prose. I knew they were about nothing, as well as something. I was no scholar. In any case, I was there, and there I was, at the Beckett conference. In the labyrinthine concrete structure I moved, to and fro, from the stairwell to the window, from window to the stairwell, from the stairwell to my seat, from my seat to the stairwell, and so on, until at last the panel on torture began.
by | May 28, 2024 10:48 am | Comments (0)
Multiverse
8026 Germantown Ave.
Philadelphia
May 22, 2024
Outside a Germantown window front full of comic books stands a sign reading: Enter the Multiverse. That’s the name of a newish store selling “curated nerd stuff,” aka a collection of comics, graphic novels, games and associated merch.
Continue reading ‘Comic Crew Melting Pot Molded In Multiverse’
by | May 22, 2024 2:46 pm | Comments (1)
by | May 22, 2024 2:44 pm | Comments (0)
KIMBERLY KING PARSONS’S WE WERE THE UNIVERSE BOOK TOUR
Skylight Books
Los Angeles
May 16, 2024
The cosmos keep bringing me back to Kimberly King Parsons. During undergrad, I studied her short story collection Black Light (2019), long-listed for the National Book Award. Last March, I introduced her at Storyfort, where she read an excerpt from her debut novel We Were the Universe (2024). It was only a matter of time before she ended up in Los Angeles — indeed, her book tour included a stop at Skylight Books in Los Feliz last week. I wouldn’t have braved the abysmal parking situation on Vermont Avenue for any old reading, but the universe was calling me to this one.
by | May 14, 2024 11:04 am | Comments (0)
Sarah Bass Photo
Orange, Dorame, and Little Badger.
Oakland Arts and Lectures: Tommy Orange and Dr. Darcie Littlefoot
Hosted by Sistah Scifi
Oakstop’s Broadway Gallery
1723 Broadway Ave.
Oakland
There There, published in 2018, was Tommy Orange’s first novel, crafted in semi-secret over several years before being shared with the world. It brought him critical acclaim and readers from all walks of life. Perhaps nowhere was this more obvious than in his hometown of Oakland, where the book is set.
Six years later, and several after I first encountered the bright orange cover and the depths of its contents, 75 people shuffled into the sunny front room of Oakstop’s gallery location and into the chairs arranged for the day’s event: a conversation between Orange, first-time moderator and fine artist Katie Dorame, and Dr. Darcie Little Badger.
