“Out demons out!” I don’t know why it’s feels so cathartic to me every time I listen to the recording on the 1968 Fugs album “Tenderness Junction” of a historic event a year before, the exorcism and attempted levitation of the Pentagon in USA’s capital city by a determined group … Read the rest
The second episode of “Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera” is out! This one tells the story of how I turned myself into an opera freak by forcing myself to listen to nothing but opera music — 100 selected arias in random order, eight hours a day every day while I … Read the rest
Writers create whole worlds; we see this most often in the realms of science fiction and fantasy. Eamon Loingsigh is a Brooklyn writer whose world is fully grounded in urban reality — the rough waterfront docks of Auld Irishtown in Brooklyn, 100 years ago. His first novel Light of the … Read the rest
David Shields is a puckish literary critic and Litkicks favorite whose epic 2010 book Reality Hunger proposed that creative writers may as well skip the pretense of fiction and simply write the truth, since that’s what readers value most in either fiction or non-fiction anyway. His latest book examines a … Read the rest
The Internet Age turns 20 years old this weekend, on Sunday, August 9.
I’m not talking about the Internet itself, which was born in the late 1960s when two computers on two different university networks first exchanged messages, thus establishing a network between networks, an “inter-net”. I’m talking about the … Read the rest
(Today is the 21st birthday of Literary Kicks. I’m making it my new habit to celebrate these birthdays with memories from friends of the site, so here’s Tim K. Gallaher remembering way back when. Tim is a former member of the 1970s San Francisco punk rock band Church Police … Read the rest
(I didn’t make it to the Brooklyn Book Festival this year, but Tara Olmsted did, and here’s her report! — Levi)
The Brooklyn Book Festival can be a mixed bag. At its worst the annual autumn event is complete chaos: no consistent theme, hot and crowded rooms, poorly moderated panels, … Read the rest
I used to go to BookExpo in New York City every Spring. It was a grand event, a joyous social swirl of writers and publishers and editors and bloggers and critics. But, regretfully, I stopped going to BookExpo a couple of years ago. Some friends tell me the event has … Read the rest
It’s because I respect musicians who bravely venture into the dark literary territory of autobiography that I am so fascinated by musical memoirs. It’s also why I’m sometimes critical of them. I have high standards regarding what a good memoir should be.
My standards are high but simple. An … Read the rest
