I see the body. I don’t know what to feel.
I drop my phone. I drop the gun.
There was a noise.
It was the sound of the screen cracking in three places.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit The Offing.
Latest News: Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Read an excerpt of THE STRANGEST in The Offing
Tuesday, October 27th, 2015“The root principle is that freedom of artistic expression or academic expression is incomplete right, it is a flawed right if it’s enjoyed at the expense of these other workers’ rights.” ANDREW ROSS talks about THE GULF with The Nation
Monday, October 26th, 2015“Our labor analytic…is not just about artists and writers,” Ross says. “It’s about the folks who are building and maintaining and operating the infrastructure for those forms of expression…. The root principle is that freedom of artistic expression or academic expression is incomplete right, it is a flawed right if it’s enjoyed at the expense of these other workers’ rights.”
There’s no blueprint for activism, but rather an impulse to recapture and rebrand cultural capital from below, so all workers can wield culture as a tool for dismantling social hierarchy, and building anew.
To that end, the new vanguard of creative laborers are constructing a new platform for protest as they go, and redefining the work of the artist, and the labor of creative protest, alongside workers of every stripe.
To read the rest of the article, visit The Nation.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn interviews MICHAEL SEIDLINGER about THE STRANGEST, the pleasures of rereading, and Camus
Monday, October 26th, 2015Vol 1 Brooklyn: How did you first end up reading Camus? And what about The Stranger initially appealed to you?
Seidlinger: I wasn’t much of a reader until after I moved away from music (I’m a failed musician), and it was when I finally went to college that I came across books like House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski, Life After God by Douglas Coupland, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, and, yup, Albert Camus’s The Stranger. It all happened in quick succession. I bought House of Leaves and swiftly devoured countless other books, many of them transgressive, experimental, surreal, and absurdist in nature. The Stranger crept up on me; I believe I bought it alongside a few other titles by Hubert Selby Jr, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec. At the time, I had become completely enamored by the Oulipos and other formally experimental practitioners. Structure was paramount and a puzzle I became obsessed with solving. The Stranger was an accident. Amazon “also bought” wormhole style purchase. I think I tossed it into my shopping cart because it was under ten dollars. I had no idea what awaited me. The book completely changed me, more than most. Perhaps more than any other title ever will.
To read the rest of the review, visit Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
“Russia and the US have played equivalent roles on opposite sides [of the Syrian conflict] without meeting to discuss ways that this is not going to be resolved by war.” CHARLES GLASS on Democracy Now!
Monday, October 26th, 2015Charles Glass discusses the Syrian civil war and Syria Burning with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!. Visit Democracy Now! to watch the full program.
“Until the regional powers and superpowers agree that the war in Syria should end, it will not end” CHARLES GLASS speaks to Boston College
Friday, October 23rd, 2015Yesterday evening, Charles Glass, author of Syria Burning, spoke to Boston College at an event sponsored by Christian Solidarity International.
In a press release, CSI summarizes Glass’s talk:
According to Glass, “The U.S., Britain and France had long harbored a wish to get rid of the Syrian regime.” When the Syrian revolution began, Glass said, his contacts in the opposition told him they were determined to keep the movement nonviolent, “to use a strategy the regime couldn’t cope with”: mass civil disobedience and general strikes. “It might have failed, but it would not have led to 250,000 dead and half the country homeless.”
Instead, Western states and their allies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey “persuaded members of opposition to take up arms, and turn peaceful demonstrations in a civil war.”
Glass described the spread of violent sectarianism in Syria as a consequence of this policy. Minority Christian, Alawite and Druze contacts of Glass’ who initially participated in the peaceful, secular uprising against the Syrian regime “have been driven out of the revolution by jihadists, and forced to side with the regime just to survive.”
Despite the utter lack of political freedom in Syria before the war, Glass said, there was “social freedom,” particularly for Christians, religious minorities and women.
But if the United States and its Islamist regional allies prevail, “that means Jahbat al Nusra [al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate] wins, Syria will be religiously cleansed, and its people will be enslaved to an ideology they don’t believe in.” Alternatively, if Russia, Iran and the Syrian regime prevail, “there will be reprisals and massacres against Syrians who opposed the regime”. On the current trajectory, Glass said, the most likely outcome is not victory for either side, but “a long and bloody war with a big impact on Europe that endures as a problem in U.S. foreign policy for years to come.”
Instead, Glass argued, the two superpowers should reach a settlement on Syria, and impose a peace on the country’s warring parties, as was done in Lebanon in the 1989 Ta’if accord. “Lebanon healed very quickly, in one respect,” Glass said. “That could happen in Syria. The most urgent thing is for the outside powers that are keeping this war alive to stop.”
Click here to watch a full video.
ANDREW ROSS interviewed about THE GULF on Uprising Radio
Thursday, October 22nd, 2015To listen to the full broadcast, visit Uprising Radio.
“Have the Palestinians finally embarked upon their long-heralded third intifada?” NORMAN FINKELSTEIN, MOUIN RABBANI and JAMIE STERN-WEINER in The Nation
Wednesday, October 21st, 2015Israel stands at a precipice, with a deranged head of state who thrives on orchestrating national hysteria, barging in on the US Congress and directing bug-eyed stares at the UN General Assembly. Netanyahu in many ways personifies the reality that the occupation has only exacerbated the most egregious features of Israeli society.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Naiton.
In the wake of winning the Clark Prize, EILEEN MYLES is in the news!
Friday, October 16th, 2015In the Paris Review, Myles discusses her work with Ben Lerner. An excerpt of this interview is available on Lit Hub.
New York Magazine profiles Miles and celebrates the recent attention she’s received. The Guardian and New Yorker likewise applaud her much deserved surge in popularity.
MICHAEL SEIDLINGER complies a “playlist of internet moods” on Largehearted Boy to celebrate the publication of THE STRANGEST
Thursday, October 15th, 2015Seidlinger introduces the playlist:
This is what I’d like to call “a playlist of internet moods,” or really a group of tracks that personally exhibit how one may feel while interacting with the online world, specifically social media. How does it relate to the book? It’s a strange world, you know, social media, and there’s nothing stranger than some of the moods and miseries we feel after having been online, connected, for so long that maybe, just maybe, we start to feel a little… disconnected.
To see his choices and listen to the playlist, visit Largehearted Boy.
“Authoritative and convincing” THE STRANGEST praised in The Modern Review
Thursday, October 15th, 2015The Strangest is a stark and deliberate analysis of life in the 21st Century. Its evaluation of not just social media, but modern presence and its adaptation of what I’ll refer to here as a the new human condition, is, much like Camus’ Stranger, authoritative and convincing. Of the string of, or even genre of, contemporary works concentrated on these themes, I found Seidlinger’s The Strangest to have been, thus far, the most concise and expressive.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Modern Review.
THE STRANGEST excerpted on Lit Hub
Thursday, October 15th, 2015Read the opening chapter of The Strangest on Lit Hub.
ROBERT GUFFEY discusses CHAMELEO on Darkness Radio
Thursday, October 15th, 2015To listen to the interview, visit Darkness Radio.
Cory Doctorow provides a shoutout for BEYOND ZERO AND ONE on Boing Boing.
Wednesday, October 14th, 2015Writes Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing: “In Beyond Zero and One, neuroscientist Andrew Smart investigates the relationship of hallucinations to consciousness, and raises some provocative and cool questions about how this relates to AI.”
KIM LONGINOTTO, author of SALMA, to receive BBC Grierson Trustees’ Award
Tuesday, October 13th, 2015Kim Longinotto has been named the 2015 recipient of the BBC Grierson Trustees’ Award.
The documentary filmmaker is known for titles including Sisters In Law, which won the CICEA award at Cannes in 2005, Pink Saris and latest release Dreamcatcher, which won the Directing Award at Sundance in January.
Announcing the award, a statement from The Grierson Trust described Longinotto as: “the creator of numerous groundbreaking films which focus on and explore the lives of women across the globe,. Throughout her career she has consistently given voice to those who have no voice living in some of the world’s most repressive and hostile societies.
To read the rest of the news, visit Screen Daily.
“A mystery novel in disguise” CESS reviewed in Electric Literature
Tuesday, October 13th, 2015Leave it to Lish then, to construct a narrative that is almost exclusively filler, to bury any conventional meaning in the filler itself, and to make it all work. Sometimes the point of wading through the cesspool is the unknowingness, the fear buried in the back of one’s mind that language might not be doing what it’s supposed to be doing. That is, after all, where it all begins to come together.
To read the rest of the review, visit Electric Literature.
Exclusive excerpt of KILLER CARE available on TruthDig
Friday, October 9th, 2015With Sherman’s approval, the trainee doctors ordered an injection of meperidine, an opiate sedative, to try to quell her jerking. Then the intern and resident intermittently spent about two hours with her, until Stone went across the street to the hospital’s sleeping quarters to nap. Weinstein concentrated on the other patients. Around three in the morning, a nurse called her to report that Libby was trying to yank her tubes out. Weinstein ordered restraints and a shot of haloperidol, an antipsychotic. Libby slept, but at dawn her fever surged to 107 degrees, she went into cardiac arrest, and died.
Weinstein called the family. She and the hospital took the position that the young woman had a “bad outcome” from a strange and unknown infection. Soon it became known that mixing the dying woman’s antidepressant Nardil (phenelzine) with Demerol (meperidine hydrochloride, an anti-spasmodic and painkiller) could trigger a fatal drug interaction.
Sidney Zion’s rage was towering, his grief bottomless, and his connections legendary. “Murder” was how he described his daughter’s demise: “They gave her a drug that was destined to kill her, then ignored her except to tie her down like a dog.” He lacerated the venerable hospital for the hazing of residents that forced them to work for days at a clip and sometimes over a hundred hours per week. “You don’t need kindergarten,” he inveighed in a New York Times op-ed piece, “to know that a resident working a 36-hour shift is in no condition to make any kind of judgment call—forget about life and death.”
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit TruthDig.
In a featured article on TomDispatch, FRIDA BERRIGAN transforms her fear of a world in turmoil into a hope for a better tomorrow
Tuesday, October 6th, 2015I don’t want to be paralyzed in the face of catastrophic climate change or any other looming calamity. I want to be motivated and spurred to action not by an apocalyptic vision of our local playground engulfed in flames or submerged under several feet of water, but by the potential for the brighter future than is surely within our grasp — within my grasp today and Madeline’s in some future that she truly deserves.
To read the rest of the piece, visit TomDisptach.
Listen to ROBERT GUFFEY read from CHAMELEO at Skylight Books
Monday, October 5th, 2015To listen to the reading and conversation with Gerry Fialka, visit Skylight Books.
Writing for The New York Review of Books, CHARLES GLASS assesses the situation in Syria and urges the international powers fueling the conflict to broker a peace
Monday, October 5th, 2015The United Nations’ latest “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic” paints a depressing portrait of the population’s unimaginable torment at the hands of government and opposition forces alike. The regime drops barrel bombs in Aleppo, and the rebels respond with gas cannisters of explosives and shrapnel. ISIS rapes and brutalizes Yazidi women whom it has declared slaves to be bought and sold. The regime’s security services practice torture on an industrial scale. Both sides besiege villages, and both sides commit massacres. The UN report’s forty-four pages of horrific war crimes should be sufficient for the outside powers to budge and call a halt to this war. What are they waiting for?
To read the rest of the article, visit The New York Review of Books.
BONNIE NADZAM and DALE JAMIESON discuss LOVE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE on Bookworm
Friday, October 2nd, 2015Dale Jamieson explains the ever-present role of nature in interpersonal relationships:
“Part of what the book is really trying to present us with is the idea that the relationship between two people necessary involves a relationship to nature. It’s not accidental or a byproduct. And that’s coming up again in ‘Holiday’ as well. Because nature is never absent. Even a degraded nature is still asserting itself in the relationships of these three women. Both in that fact that they have to actually come to a fantasy place to escape the realties of nature. And also because their imagination of nature is also informing what is they’re experiencing in their fantasy.”
To listen to the rest of the interview, visit KCRW.
ELISSA SHEVINSKY profiled in San Jose Mercury News
Thursday, October 1st, 2015Shevinsky admits to being “a compulsive writer” who scribbles notes continuously, but the fully formed essays she contributes to “Lean Out” required drastic measures. “I had to lock myself away. I booked a hotel room. I slept, wrote, didn’t talk to anyone. It’s a solitary thing.”
But her debut book is exactly the opposite of solitary. “I did a big people search. The world needed this book. It isn’t ‘the Elissa book.’ We really want to hear unheard stories. I felt even well-intentioned journalists were putting their story in my story. We needed women’s stories to be unedited. I respect their voices.”
The voices are as varied as the visible light’s color spectrum. Twilio software engineer Dom DeGuzman’s perspective and can-do “rock climbing” steps to success are calm and encouraging; Google engineer Erica Joy writes poignantly and vulnerably of “losing herself” as a woman of color for the sake of being included with co-workers whose behavior ranged from covert discrimination (pay inequities) to blatant sexist and racist behavior; Lesbians Who Tech founder Leanne Pittsford boldly reflects a recurring theme that instead of building complaint lists or deepening their voices at the corporate board table, women (and men) in tech must be architects of actual infrastructures that support diversity.
To read the rest of the review, visit San Jose Mercury News.
Reality Sandwich provides an exclusive excerpt of LOVE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Tuesday, September 29th, 2015Advertisements for New Harmony had been accurate. Bring your hungry, your traumatized, your bored, your restless, your longing to forget. It was as green and vibrant a city as any of them could have imagined. There were lakes, gardens, schools, restaurants, shops, museums, and yes, an ocean complete with a necklace of islands and a pounding surf of beginner-, intermediate- and advanced-sized waves dissolving in a white lace of clean sea foam on golden sands.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Reality Sandwich.
“The taut, elegant, prose of this talented young storyteller”: the Times Literary Supplement raves about TRUE FALSE by MILES KLEE
Monday, September 28th, 2015The sketches in True False evoke, in their noir surrealism, something of the icy oddness associated with the work of the film director David Lynch. This is not an effect that is easily achieved, and the author is to be commended for pulling it off.
Read the full review in the Times Literary Supplement.
“That’s why I think everyone who hires or manages anyone in tech ought to read the remarkable book, LEAN OUT, edited by Elissa Shevinsky.” —Venturebeat
Monday, September 28th, 2015Lean Out is clearly a response to Sheryl Sandberg’s wildly successful book Lean In, which convinced a small army of women to step up, “lean in” to their workplaces, and demand more responsibility and more respect. Shevinsky and the authors of the essays in this book take a different angle: If tech companies are unwelcoming places, to hell with them. Start your own company and run it better.
Read the full review in Venturebeat.
“A mindbending story, funny in places but ultimately very unsettling.” Coast to Coast AM’s George Knapp interviews the author of CHAMELEO
Thursday, September 24th, 2015“Coast to Coast AM: Organisms, Interrogations, and Gang-stalking”
“We burrow way down deep through the rabbit hole, through the looking glass…dark stuff, creepy, disturbing…shines light on the people who really pull the levers of power. …After I read the book we’re going to be discussing tonight, I had to rethink my postions. Spies, and lies, and high-tech, where the stakes are huge, and no one can be trusted… It’s a mindbending story, funny in places but ultimately very unsettling.”
Listen to the full interview at Coast to Coast.
PYMNTS.com talks to COLIN ROBINSON about OR BOOKS‘ anti-Amazon model
Thursday, September 24th, 2015“Our model of selling direct works best where we can identify communities that will be interested in a particular book we’re publishing,” says Robinson.
“Increasingly,” he continues, “as we build our customer database, we are transitioning from trying to find an audience for our books — which conventional publishers regard as their primary responsibility — to trying to find books for our audience, which, in my opinion, will be the approach of publishers in the future … the modern, forward-looking ones.”
Finding it “odd that publishers generally say their first obligation is to their authors, rather than their readers,” Robinson instead follows a consumer-first approach.
Read the full piece at PYMNTS.com.
Two brilliant back-to-back reviews in Kirkus Reviews, one for EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION (appearing Sept. 21) and one for KILLER CARE (Sept. 22)
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015An anthology calling upon American writers to address the plight of the Palestinians. Editor Freeman notes in her introduction, “what can and cannot be done in America is a question that carries enormous hope on the part of people who do not live here.” ….A vibrant, high-spirited collection that will appeal to those on one side of this complex geopolitical conundrum.
To read the full review of Extraordinary Rendition, visit Kirkus Reviews.
A succinct, disturbing report on the prevalence of malpractice in modern medicine. Fortunately, Lieber doesn’t decorate his study with scare tactics or confusing jargon; his perspective is clearly that of an informed consumer concerned with the welfare of those seeking American medical care. …An imperative analysis that begs for discussion by industry watchdogs and consumers alike.
To read the full review of Killer Care, visit Kirkus Reviews.
Business Insider excerpts A NARCO HISTORY
Tuesday, September 15th, 2015To read the excerpt, visit Business Insider.
In an excerpt of SYRIA BURNING published on Mondoweiss, CHARLES GLASS asks whether Syria’s revolution could have been different
Friday, September 11th, 2015Could Syria’s revolution have been different? At its birth in the spring of 2011, it promised hope for a better, freer life for Syria’s people. Syrian aspirations resonated with lovers of liberty everywhere: an end to governmental corruption and arbitrary arrest; an independent judiciary; a free press; equality before the law; abolition of torture; genuine elections leading to legitimate authority; and democratic institutions responsible to the governed. The state responded with arrests and violence. Dissidence evolved into war. Those who eventually captured the revolution dropped its original objectives in favor of supplanting a secular dictatorship with a dictatorial theocracy. The revolution was defeated from within, albeit with much assistance from outside powers motivated by anything but the good of the Syrian people.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Mondoweiss.
“The clearest and simplest account of events in Iraq and Syria leading up to the present nightmare” THE JIHADIS RETURN praised by Financial Times
Friday, September 11th, 2015The shortest, and the one that gives the clearest and simplest account of events in Iraq and Syria leading up to the present nightmare, is by Patrick Cockburn, whose reports on the Middle East for the Independent have won him almost universal respect among specialists. He certainly deserves high marks for spotting the importance of Isis earlier than most. In fact, his book was first published, as The Jihadis Return, a year ago. But it so quickly established itself as essential reading on the subject that Verso republished it as The Rise of Islamic State in February, with a new afterword.
To read the rest of the review, visit Financial Times.
