 JULY, 2010: MY BELATED FAN LETTER
A Eulogy for David Markson
By KELLY SPOER
Reader's Block had become my book to judge people by. I'd lend it to them, and if they got it, they got me.
[Full article]
|
 JULY, 2010: OPTIMISM FOR DUMMIES
A Few Basic Reasons to Be Excited About Fiction
By YENNIE CHEUNG
It’s no surprise that while the big New York publishing houses continue to struggle, small publishers have taken cues from their indie rock—in some cases, quite literally.
[Full article] |
 APRIL, 2010: RELIVING YOUR FIRST TIME
What literary work do you wish you could read again for the first time? We pose the question to ten authors including Junot Díaz (pictured), Dan Chaon, Marisa Silver, and Steve Almond.
[Full article] |
 FEBRUARY, 2010: EULOGY FOR A FELLOW PHONY
Love him or hate him, J.D. Salinger spoke to us all
By
YENNIE CHEUNG
If you’re so inclined, you’re free to smirk and make snide comments about what Holden Caulfield might think about yet another Salinger fan paying tribute to his memory. Believe me, I get it.
[Full article] |
 JANUARY, 2010: FOR THE LOVE OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
A New Year's Challenge to the women writers of the world
By
YENNIE CHEUNG
In the spirit of change, I propose a gender-wide resolution for us all: Let’s stop our whining and write. Better yet, let’s stop our whining and write better.
[Full article] |
 JANUARY, 2010: WHY I'M NO LONGER EATING ANIMALS (AGAIN)
With a little help from Jonathan Safran Foer
By
KYLE OLSON
Even if it perhaps isn't right to kill and eat living things and the living condition of animals pre-food is deplorable and the whole industry is environmentally unsound...fried chicken is fucking delicious.
[Full article] |
 DECEMBER, 2009: SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON
The Red Book by Carl Jung
By
MARIE MUNDACA
In 1913, at the age of 38, Jung began to be disturbed by waking visions of malevolent spirits filling his house. Rather than discount this, Jung embarked on a journey into what seems like lunacy and directly confronted his demons. He kept a dream diary.
[Full article] |
 NOVEMBER, 2009: BOOKS TO MOVIES
A Look at Two Popular Adaptations
By
MARIE MUNDACA & YENNIE CHEUNG
Marie and Yennie explore some of the difficulties of bringing our favorite books to the screen by examinging John Krasinski's take on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and the adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, written by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers.
[Brief Interviews with Hideous Men]
[Where the Wild Things Are] |
 OCTOBER, 2009: WHAT'S A GUY GOTTA DO TO GET NIGHTMARES AROUND HERE?
The Dearth of Good Horror and the Downside of Hot Vampire Sex
By
KYLE OLSON
[True Blood] is fun enough in a goofy "let's-watch-hot-people-and-vampires-have-sex" kind of way, but...you can’t simply add the supernatural to an erotic mystery (even if there are tense and frightening parts) and put it in the horror section.
[Full
article]
|
 JULY, 2009: AN
OPEN LETTER TO ROERTA SILMAN
RE: The Day Alice Hoffman Went Crazypants
By
YENNIE CHEUNG
I've read your review, Mrs. Silman, and quite frankly,
I'm appalled. How dare you use such subtlety of language
and cleverness of tone as to insult Alice Hoffman without
the rest of the literate world even noticing.
[Full
article] |
 JUNE,
2009: IS LITERATURE POST-QUEER?
Musings on the GLBT Genre
By
MATTHEW MERENDO
There is a full-fledged war on labels based on sexualities,
and labels for people aren't the only ones in danger.
Ask any author who writes novels with gay characters,
and there's a good chance he'll do everything but spit
at you if you say he writes gay novels or is a gay author.
[Full article] |
 MARCH,
2009: IN DEFENSE OF SNARK
Why David Denby's got the wrong idea about Gen X's chief
export
By MARIE MUNDACA
Denby's
main thesis is two-fold: 1. snark, the main form of
communication and journalism on the internet, is bleeding
into real journalism and intellectual discourse, and
2. the cruelty of snark has gotten out of control.
[Full article]
|
 FEBRUARY,
2009: ALTERNATE ENDINGS
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Screenplay
By YENNIE CHEUNG
Logically,
we recognize that a 400-page novel would be difficult
to condense into a two (or even three) hour movie without
some creative reconstruction...but even with those allowances,
we still nitpick the plot holes and rushed explanations
that keep the films from ever being comparable to the
books.
[Full article]
|
 JANUARY,
2009: THE
GUYS' GUIDE TO PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
By
KYLE OLSON
[Pride and Prejudice is] like the Rosetta Stone
for females: the resource that, once cracked, gives
us the insight to achieve understanding far beyond what
we had previously held. So, gentlemen, if we can only
harness the secrets of this novel, our luck in love
could drastically change.
[Full
article]
|
 OCTOBER,
2008: REMEMBERING DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
By
MARIE MUNDACA
As
it turned out Wallace and Infinite Jest were
not just the normal lit-of-the-moment fluff. He showed
readers could be as funny as Mark Leyner, but as deep
as Fydor Dostoevsky. He was a contemporary author equal
parts Franz Kafka and Woody Allen.
[Full
article]
|
 OCTOBER,
2008: MAKING THE CASE FOR PESSIMISTIC ENLIGHTENMENT INVOLVING
MIND-DESTROYING BOOKS AND GIANT TENTACLED HORRORS
By
KYLE OLSON
[Lovecraft's stories] have managed to worm their way into
the collective conscious of America...wormed their way
like sightless, teethed, and malicious creatures, quietly
burrowing through the warm meat of our brains while we
sleep and taking over our bodies to assist in the resurrection
of forgotten and terrible gods against our wills.
[Full article]
|
 SEPTEMBER,
2008: POLITICAL BOOKS IN A SOUNDBITE ELECTION
By CHRIS MACKOWSKI
What
a candidate says in a soundbite exists in the here and
now and is then gone in a literal electronic flash (although
soundbites sometimes find extended life in YouTube clips
and attack ads). What candidates write in a book, on the
other hand, is crafted to last.
[Full article]
|
|
 SEPTEMBER,
2008: IF YOU LOVE A BOOK, SET
IT FREE
Tracking the History of a Book and Its Readers
(Part Two)
By
YENNIE CHEUNG
Each
of us found our own special connection to the main character
and her story. Mona's story touched our emotions and
each of us connected to her in a different way. Each
person that read the book wanted someone else in our
group to experience it.
[Full
article]
|
 AUGUST,
2008: IF YOU LOVE A BOOK, SET IT FREE
Tracking the History of a Book and Its Readers (Part
One)
By YENNIE CHEUNG
I had no idea if these seven women were all friends sharing
the same book or if they were strangers. The romantic
in me was inclined to believe the latter, though; the
idea of sending a book out into the world to be discovered
by others felt as magical as [Aimee] Bender's book itself.
[Full
article] |
|
|
 JULY,
2008: IT
FELT LIKE THIS CITY WAS THE END OF THE WORLD
A Look at No Wave New York
By MARIE MUNDACA
I
enviously watched the angular college-age hipsters—usually
sitting sullenly through songs by the Teardrop Explodes
and the Yachts, drinking and smoking and glaring through
curtains of slick hair—jump up and danced in a spasmodic
frenzy when Medium Medium's "Hungry So Angry" would play.
I could never be as cool as those thin white dukes and
duchesses of nihilism.
[Full article]
|
 JUNE,
2008: MOVING
DAY
An Adventure in Materialism Leading to Insight About Oneself
By
KYLE OLSON
I
suppose I was on a high from reading Gravity's Rainbow
and Infinite Jest in one year, and I felt I could
take on any of history's forbiddingly hefty books. Of
course, then I tried to read Ulysses, which slapped
me around like it caught me groping its daughter.
[Full
article]
|
 MAY,
2008: ONE
OF US
Reflecting
on Personal Geekery with Benjamin Nugent's American
Nerd
By MARIE MUNDACA
After
high school, I found that some of my college friends (all
male, by the way) had a quixotic relationship with the
idea of autism. "I think I'm autistic," they would muse
misty-eyed, like someone who just realized that he found
the love of his life.
[Full
article]
|
 APRIL,
2008: THE
QUIET PLEASURES OF BARBARA PYM
By
AIKO AKERS
Was the truly mundane, everyday world where
we spend the vast majority of our time unworthy of being
captured in writing? Or was its subtle beauty too elusive,
like some exotic flower that, as soon as it's plucked,
droops and fades before one's eyes into a sad, wilted
little weed?
[Full article]
|
APRIL
FOOLS, 2008: THE
AMAZON CANDLE™
Amazon
Announces Yet Another New High-Tech Reading Device
By
CHRIS MACKOWSKI
"When
we say 'revolutionary,' we really mean 'Revolution-era,'"
said Amazon CEO Jeffery Bezos. "This technology has been
around for centuries. We've made some significant improvements
by capitalizing the 'C' and adding a trademark symbol."
[Full article]
|
 APRIL,
2008: A SWEET VALLEY HIGH REUNION
The Wakefield Twins Are Back—and
Now They're Armed with Cell Phones!
By YENNIE CHEUNG
I'd
like to believe that if Rick Andover attempted to carjack
one of my female students and take her on a drunken joyride,
she'd take the heel of her strappy sandal and ram it through
his ear canal. Elizabeth and Jessica? They buckled
up. And screamed for help. To the football team.
It's kind of pathetic.
[Full article]
|
 MARCH,
2008: FRANKENSTEIN'S
LEGACY
How Mary Shelley's Famous Story Manages to Stay Alive
After All These Years
By
CHRIS MACKOWSKI
By
adapting the story, does the process of derivation rob
it of the very thing that makes it so powerful in the
first place? The question becomes the very question [Mary]
Shelley asks: What is a soul, and can an artificial creation
have one? Is the soul of Shelley's story still present
in these adaptations?
[Full article]
|
 JANUARY,
2008: POETRY FOR A PROSAIC WORLD: THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES
By BRIAN HURLEY
Roberto
Bolaño's characters use poetry to classify the
world in their own terms. For people who are mired in
poverty, political oppression, or sexual repression, the
ability to do this can mean the difference between life
and death.
[Full article]
|
 DECEMBER,
2007:
EXERCISES
IN LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE
By THE HBC STAFF
Holocaust
tear-jerkers, hand-holding strangers, a non-Orwellian
1984, and Aerosmith van art. The HBC tackles a few of
Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July's assignments in creativity.
[Full article] |
 OCTOBER,
2007:
LESS SUB, MORE TEXT
A Queer Tale of Buffy Fandom and Fan Fiction
By JULIA WATSON
What
started as a bit of musing about how Willow and Tara might
have consummated their relationship quickly turned into
twenty or so pages of Tara teasing and tempting Willow
to get over her sexual "shyness." Yes, she used magic.
But she used sexier magic, and she used wiles and wickedness,
too.
[Full article] |
 OCTOBER,
2007: THE
PRESENCE OF THE OTHER
A History of LGBT Themes in Science Fiction/Fantasy Writing
By TRACI CASTLEBERRY
Some fifteen percent of queer folk find out what it means
to be queer through the written word, and considering
that fewer people are reading these days, that's a significant
percentage. Looking back on it, I like to blame Mercedes
Lackey for the fact that all my own books and stories
have gay protagonists.
[Full article]
|
 SEPTEMBER,
2007: I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT BOOKS—BUT MANY PEOPLE
CAN
By CHRIS
MACKOWSKI
People
who don't read miss out on a book's ability to stimulate
thinking, to explore new perspectives, to inspire the
imagination. Saddest of all, they don't even know the
pleasure they're missing (even if they think they do).
[Full
article]
|
 SEPTEMBER,
2007: WHY I'M JEALOUS OF STEPHENIE MEYER
By YENNIE CHEUNG
Suddenly disconcerted, I felt as if I had something to
prove. I began to change my storyline so that it would
not seem so similar to Meyer's, thus breaking a major
rule of good storytelling: Don't be influenced by the
works of other writers.
[Full
article] |
 JULY,
2007: AN URBAN FAIRY WONDERLAND
The
Books of Francesca Lia Block
By BRI LAFOND
Francesca Lia Block weaves the elements of urban LA reality
with her own magic touch to create a City of Angels that
feels more real to this California native than most attempts
to capture the real.
[Full article] |
 JUNE,
2007: TRUE LIFE TALES OF FANDOM, PORNOGRAPHY, AND ATTEMPTED
VIOLENCE!
Read on, true believers, for a walk down memory lane rife
with action, adventure, and numerous Spider-Man references!
By KYLE OLSON
I
was no longer "too old" for comics, as there were a wealth
of them out there that were either not written with children
in mind or were of a nature that most parents would do
their damnedest to keep out of their child's hands.
[Full article]
|
 APRIL,
2007: AN ESSAY IN WHICH KURT VONNEGUT REMAINS DEAD
By JOE DAVENPORT
Even this fresh, brilliant writer was torn apart by his
critics. He famously remarked that critics tended to confuse
the science fiction drawer for a urinal, so I can't imagine
how he managed to keep creating through the rising flood
of piss.
[Full article] |
 MARCH,
2007: IN THE CEMETERY WHERE AL JOLSON IS BURIED
By YENNIE CHEUNG
The
discovery of Wolfson's grave called to question the metaphors
that literature experts find in the story's title. Can
one truly call Al Jolson's role in the story symbolic
if the woman really is buried in the cemetery where Al
Jolson is buried?
[Full
article] |
SEPTEMBER, 2010: ATTICUS FINCH AND THE SEARCH FOR MEANING IN MONROEVILLE