Alex Kudera's Blog, page 57

Flight of the Crow

Passenger plays live .

body snatching

And then Nicole Krauss accused her dear, deceased friend Philip Roth of body snatching, but her words also remind me of my greatness: 

"The best and bravest writers are savage in their self-cannibalisation, and supply their alter egos with the most difficult versions of themselves, filling them with weakness, loading them with humiliations, highlighting their loserdom, their losses, their lostness."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

And then Lawrence Ferlinghetti ventured far past an average man's lifespan, yet still passed on.

$7.35

. . . is a bargain sinking fast!

Anxiety Chronicles

In "Sarah Moss's Anxiety Chronicles," Tara K. Menon mentions Fight for Your Long Day although it's obvious that she hasn't read the book. Only someone who has avoided my debut novel would describe it as one that fails to recognize the "value of humanistic inquiry"; so naturally, the writer is tenure-track at Harvard.

Philip Roth on Blake Bailey

Enjoy a fun role reversal from the grave; in Harper's Magazine, it's Joshua Cohen on Blake Bailey's new biography of Philip Roth.

100 from Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Discover 100 books to read from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. At a quick glance, Babel, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Hrabal, and Schulz would be my favorites among authors listed here.

the great American real-estate novel

Monkeybicycle fiction editor James Tate Hill joked on twitter about writing "the great real estate novel," and I tweeted back that one to two of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels fall into this category. . . and then within a week or two, I picked up my navy blue hardcover edition of Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City and learned that, in fact, this was the great real-estate novel of our time. Florida short sales, routine foreclosures, overbuilt subdivisions, leaking pipes, busted garage doors, and broken dreams are all invited to the party. Hill, Ford, and Jay McInerney can only dream of drinking the same I-4 7-11 colas as Orlando's Nathan Holic. A hundred pages in, I find BLM-SC to be a fun and informative page-turner with a creative hybrid model, mostly novel with some "choose your own adventure" and graphic elements. It's worth a look.

PS--You can buy five copies of this book for less than the average ticket to Disney World.

Bob Wells

"Bob [Wells] didn’t want his father’s fate, but there he was. As days became decades, he went to a job he hated, worked with people he didn’t like, to buy things he didn’t want. By his own telling, he was the living embodiment of Thoreau’s 'quiet desperation.' He knew he wasn’t happy, but it never occurred to him to live differently."

ten million

We're only missing ten million jobs.