Sunday Morning! “Rat Bohemia” by Sarah Schulman
This 1995 novel by Sarah Schulman is a good reminder of a time when people moved to cities like New York because they weren’t welcome at home.
Category: Books
Sunday Morning! Leonora Carrington, the Complete Stories
Like fairy tales for mad children, the stories of Leonora Carrington are as packed with strangeness and complete imaginative freedom as her paintings.
Sunday Morning! “The Monkey’s Wrench” by Primo Levi
Primo Levi is best remembered as one of the great novelists of the Holocaust; he was one of the few Italian Jews sent to Auschwitz who survived, and he wrote about it
Monday! (Sunday Part Two) “Music is Over!” by Ben Arzate
In an era of boring mass media, we need creative weirdness more than ever. “Music is Over!” gets weird. But weird is probably what we most need right now.
On The Satanic Verses
There are a handful of verses in the Koran and also a book by Salman Rushdie called “The Satanic Verses”. I want to talk about both.
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.
Book Burning
“Desktop covid dividers and a refrigerator was “to be recycled.” But the five books deemed inappropriate were “to be destroyed.”
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?
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! “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.
Maus and The “Ban”
I’d be interested to know what the Maus fans will say about the book that replaced Maus if Maus gets reinstated.
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
