The drivel parts, or we’ll tell him we’re frightened and have to go home
Elizabeth Gumport re-reads Richard Yates over at Bookslut: We do not read Yates to confirm some idealized vision of ourselves, but because he reveals how such illusions destroy those who indulge in them. His renewed appeal comes not from what he can tell us about the past, but what he can tell us about the […]
The Missing Links
Dan Rhodes, the the graphic novel (sort of) * Howard Devoto on Magazine’s reunion: “We haven’t had a full band rehearsal yet. It’ll be fine!” More here * Andy Warhol‘s greatest album covers: The Rolling Stones: Sticky Fingers (1971) Probably Warhol’s most problematic album cover, in that 1) Each copy contained an actual zipper attached […]
Barbaric yawps
Stop Smiling on the films of Robert Frank: A Swiss-Jewish ex-pat who immigrated to an America from which he grew profoundly estranged, Frank possessed an outsider’s vision that quickly found kindred spirit in the major bohemian art of the Fifties, the Beat scene of downtown Manhattan. Replacing the isolated melancholy of still photography with the […]
Hackney Like It Used To Be
In Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, Iain Sinclair brings together his fictional practices and his cultural journalism with stunning results. Sinclair has interviewed dozens of subterranean London figures such as Chris Petit and then, as he frankly admits, freely rewritten what they told him to suit his own agenda. I’ve already had hours of fun trying to work out what is true and what is made up in this book, and I’m sure once more people have read it this will generate endless pub discussions too.
Another deranged London anti-classic from Iain Sinclair, says Stewart Home.
3:AM Top 5: Lee Rourke
Exciting news: 3:AM‘s co-editor Lee Rourke has signed a deal with Melville House Publishing in New York for his novel The Canal. Home to such authors as Benoit Duteurtre, Tao Lin and Stephen Dixon, MHP are, as Lee says, “mouthwateringly independent” [you can read an interview with MHP’s Dennis Loy Johnson here]. To celebrate Lee’s […]