After a two-year absence, it’s the return of the Summer Reading List! This year we have reading recommendations from newcomers Carla Nappi, Maria Abrams, John Morrison, and Drew S. Burk, and from SRL veterans Lance Strate, Steven Shaviro, Lily Brewer, Ashley Crawford, Alex Burns, Joseph Nechvatal, Peter Lunenfeld, Paul Levinson, Howard Rheingold, and myself. We… Continue reading Summer Reading List, 2021
There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone I watched as a kid called “Time Enough At Last.” I don’t remember all of it, just the end: There’s a man, a bibliophile, he’s the last person left on earth, and he’s ecstatic because he’s surrounded by books. Then he breaks his glasses. One book the protagonist probably wouldn’t… Continue reading The End of the World As We Know It
On the first day of my writing classes, I make my students do the improv-writing one-sentence exercise. It’s the one where you pick a line from some random source—a book, a magazine, a writing partner—and use it as a jumping-off point to write a story. It’s a great exercise for getting unstuck as a writer,… Continue reading Exploring the Expanded Field
Hip-hop and the scholarship surrounding it are still young enough that its origin story gets repeated to some degree in every book written. In his Bedroom Beats & B-Sides (Velocity Press, 2020), Laurent Fintoni mercifully assumes the reader has a working knowledge of hip-hop’s modes of production and just gets right to it. The book… Continue reading Rainy-Day Rhythms and Bedroom Beats
This year might have been like living in the longest, most boring bottle episode ever, but it was a good time for reading. Whether you were catching up on the TBR pile or staying up on new releases, there was plenty of time for both. I quit social media last summer (except for Twitter, which… Continue reading Lockdown Literature, 2020
