Sunday Morning: “Bad Day at Black Rock” by John Sturges
Bad Day at Black Rock is one film that straddles genres: its setting is Western and its storyline is noir.
Author: Rufus F.
Sunday Morning! “Modern Love” by Constance DeJong
A recovered Constance DeJong novel from late 70s NYC that overflows its banks and exhausts all possibilities without exhausting the reader like many experimental novels do.
Sunday Morning! “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead
In recent weeks, Colson Whitehead has become the writer who leaves me thinking “Man, how does he get his novels to go like that?!”
Sunday Morning! “Berg” by Ann Quin
Berg seems to go through a crisis of his own. Does he really want to kill this stranger? Or does he want to seduce the man’s mistress?
Movie Notes: “Crimes of the Future” (2022)
Really, what’s most striking about Crimes of the Future is how un-futuristic the world depicted actually is
Sunday Morning! “Voices in the Evening” by Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg’s prose captures the stark, fragmented absurdity of life after the cataclysm of Fascism: everything is right there, but how do we engage with it?
Sunday Morning! “Rudin” by Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev’s first novel tells of a common type: the brilliant intellectual who could have changed the world, if only he’d get out of his own way.
Sunday Morning! “This is Memorial Device” by David Keenan
Because, like all great books on music, David Keenan is really writing about us, nudging us in the ribs, and saying Hey, do you remember…
Sunday Morning! “The Gospel Singer” by Harry Crews
It’s hard to write about the South. Harry Crews’s first novel took a tone somewhere between the Grand Guignol and the Grand Ole’ Opry.
Sunday Morning! “Nina Simone’s Gum” by Warren Ellis
Warren Ellis’s new book “Nina Simone’s Gum” is everyone he encountered in his mad quest to save a piece of chewing gum that the legendary singer had left behind on her piano
Sunday! “Germinal” by Émile Zola
Germinal by Émile Zola, meanwhile, is a sort of fever dream of hell on earth that still hits hard, even if you’ve never set foot in a coal mine.
Sunday Morning! “They” by Kay Dick
This recently-rediscovered novella is a chilling anomaly in dystopian fiction: here the censorious “they” feel no need to explain, justify, or announce themselves. We know them only by their hatreds.
Sunday Morning! “Butcher’s Crossing” by John Williams
In John Williams great work of Western Noir, the one-big-heist goes wrong and flawed men become most fully themselves in failure, like all of us
Sunday Morning! “Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted” by Gary Barwin
Gary Barwin is a writer of seemingly boundless energy and invention, and it does admittedly get a bit overwhelming at times.
Sunday Morning! “How I Became One of the Invisible” by David Rattray
David Rattray believed that poetry is a mystical language and the poet is a coyote smuggling us into the world of the spirit.
Sunday Morning! “New Animal” by Ella Baxter
In this debut novel, “New Animal” by Ella Baxter, a mortuary artist deals with all of the messy unruliness of bodies and grief.
Sunday Morning! “The Cannibal” by: John Hawkes
I chose The Cannibal by John Hawkes because it was on a table of writers who are generally considered the “real deal” by other writers.
Sunday Morning! Five short stories by Shirley Jackson
If you’ve felt that a large chunk of your society has gone insane-or YOU have-there’s much you might relate to in the short stories of Shirley Jackson.
Sunday Morning! “Hangsaman” by Shirley Jackson
Maybe stories about the post-war suburban idyll only really work if they’re dark and Gothic and frightening and by Shirley Jackson
Sunday Morning: “Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street” by Preston Fassel
I did want to talk a little about the book “Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street ” by Preston Fassel, which just came out
