bell hooks.
The original mis-education.
Like Paris in the twenties or postwar Greenwich Village, Brooklyn today is experiencing an extraordinary cultural boom. In recent years, writers of all stripes—from Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead to Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer—have flocked to its patchwork of distinctive neighborhoods. But as literary critic and journalist Evan Hughes reveals, the rich literary life now flourishing in Brooklyn is part of a larger, fascinating history. With a dynamic mix of literary biography and urban history, Hughes takes us on a tour of Brooklyn past and present and reveals that hiding in Walt Whitman’s Fort Greene Park, Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge, the raw Williamsburg of Henry Miller’s youth, Truman Capote’s famed house on Willow Street, and the contested streets of Jonathan Lethem’s Boerum Hill is the story of more than a century of life in America’s cities.
Literary Brooklyn is a prismatic investigation into a rich literary inheritance, but most of all it’s a deep look into the beloved borough, a place as diverse and captivating as the people who walk its streets and write its stories.
Welcome to Christopher Boucher’s zany literary universe, a place where metaphors shift beneath your feet, familiar words assume new meanings, objects talk, trees attack, and time actually is money. Modeled on the cult classic 1969 hippie handbook of the same name, How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is an astonishing tour-de-force that tackles some of life’s biggest questions: How do you cope with losing a parent? What’s the secret to raising a child? How do you keep love alive? How do you get your car to start?
"Black Cool is sexy, no doubt. But the sexy comes from the mind as well as the body, the substance as well as the style. It’s deep sexy. It’s smart. It’s multi-layered fine."
- http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/05/28/rebecca-walker-black-is-cool/
Junot Diaz at his September 21, 2012 reading and discussion of life, love and his latest book This Is How You Lose Her at The Jimmy Carter Center in Atlanta, GA.
Warning: He is for real and his language reflects that at times.
(Apologies for the slight and temporary moments of audio background noise)
The books that we choose to keep and display—let alone read—can say a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves. In My Ideal Bookshelf, one hundred leading cultural figures, including writers Chuck Klosterman, Jennifer Egan, and Michael Chabon, musicians Patti Smith and Thurston Moore, chefs and food writers Alice Waters and Mark Bittman, and fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, reveal the books that matter to them most—books that reflect their obsessions and ambitions and in many cases helped them find their way in the world.
Original paintings by artist Jane Mount showcase the selections, with colorful, hand-lettered book spines and occasional objets d’art from the contributors’ personal bookshelves. The paintings are accompanied by first-person commentary drawn from interviews with editor Thessaly La Force, which touch on everything from the choice of books to becoming a writer to surprising sources of inspiration. This exquisite collection provides rare insight into the creative process and artistic development of today’s most intriguing writers, innovators, and visionaries.
"We often think of our births as being the result of a chance series of historical and personal events, of the ebb and flow of society, as well as the personal circumstances of our own parents and grandparents—that is, to the tendril-like current of the world itself. But our deaths also stem from these comings and goings—perhaps even more so—and from circumstances both important and trivial. Just as our coming into the world is the result of many thousands of actions, both secret and public, so is our leaving it. In order to explain any, death especially a violent, mysterious death, it should be enough to carry out an exhaustive review of time, to retrieve every detail, every word, every avatar of that life, and then to wait for our intelligence to decipher the constellation formed from all these facts."
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All Men are Liars
Alberto Manguel
For the love of books.
