David Samuel Levinson's Blog, page 7

Hipster Writers Take Over The World

I won't mention the writer's name because I don't want to give it any more press than it has already gotten. But I'll give you a hint: Tao Lin. Oops. I wrote it. But now that I have, could someone please tell me why this guy has a career and how he got it? Ever [...:]

Das Fleisch für das Leben

While sitting in the doctor's office today, I picked up a copy of Stern, flipped through the horrifying pictures of a water-logged Pakistan, then happened upon a picture of—you guessed it—Jonathan Safran Foer. Because really what could possibly come after an article written entirely in German about Pakistan but an article written entirely in German [...:]

Buying The Autobiography of Jenny X is…

just as easy as making Dale's Meyer Lemon Cheesecake. Okay, I lie. Buying your copy of Jenny X is much much easier. You don't need all those other messy ingredients, like lemons and butter and sugar and flour. You don't need an oven. All you need is a finger and a keyboard and a computer screen [...:]

The Autobiography of Jenny X

Lisa Dierbeck follows up her stunning debut, One Pill Makes You Smaller, with a new novel that is as menacing and fast-paced as a thriller, but whose sentences read like something out of a different age, when language and the ear for it had not yet been sundered one from the other. You will love [...:]

Mischief + Mayhem = A Publishing Crusade

Dale Peck, the crafty hatchet man and author of umpteen novels, from Martin And John to his most recent, Shift (of which you can read an excerpt below), is up to some new tricks, it seems, with a brand-new publishing venture called Mischief + Mayhem Books. Something of a cult figure in the literary circles of [...:]

I Took A Book: The Rosh Hashanah Confession

Jim Thompson's The Grifters makes me weak in the knee joints. His sentences, while mostly un-pretty, make me swoon just the same. Slithery, cranky, unsentimental—these are the adjectives that limn his characters de guerre and whom he deploys with an arsonist's ferocity in one superlative scene after another. I didn't mean to steal the copy [...:]

Misery Lit and A. S. Byatt

Okay, so I guess I'll give this another go and see what happens. I know, I know, no one's twisting my arm and all that. One just feels so exposed, hanging one's penis out in the wind to be gently ruffled or ungently rouged. But, well, er, hum, huh… I'm a little behind the curve, [...:]

The New Social Novel

But before I tear this infernally stupid blog down, I thought I'd go out kicking and screaming and say this: today's literary novel sucks ass, folks. It's dull and boring and you know it immediately because it's written in precious purpled prose and has no plot and no soul whatsoever. It meanders from set piece [...:]

Blogging Schmogging

I'm just not a blogger. It doesn't wake me up in the morning. It doesn't keep me company at night. I just don't care that much about what's going on in the world, mine, yours, theirs, ours, to keep "blogging" about it. Maybe it's a generational thing, but I think blogs are stupid. I think [...:]

Vagina Bites Man: News at Jezebel

…and over at The Prairie Schooner Blog, Timothy Shaffert has this to report: Griffin aligns the new-wave/punk impulse to trash The Scarlet Letter (as "a prissy piece of drivel") with that of defending Bob Guccione's all-star porno Caligula (as artful education). Ultimately, Griffin and Shivani share a similar distaste for contemporary literature—Griffin laments the scatological and over-sexed [...:]