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

I first bought Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day (Macmillan, 1998) when it came out because of the cover. Something about the colors… I kept picking it up, putting it back, and then coming back to the shelf. Once I read the back-cover copy and the Ursula K. Le Guin blurb, I was in. I’ve… Continue reading The Dazzle of Day

Bret Easton Ellis has made a career out of thinly skinning his own experiences with a fictional sheen. All the way back to his college days with Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) through his layers of postmodernism with Glamorama (2000) and Lunar Park (2006). Given his fictionalized appearance in Lunar… Continue reading Memoirs and Misinformation