#BookTok. #bookstagram. Celebrity book clubs. Literary websites.
Book suggestions are everywhere these days.
The proliferation of book talk is a good thing, but can sometimes seem daunting when looking for your next read. Where do you discover new books?
Friends have always been my foremost introductions to books. The internet and social media have expanded both my social circle and number of book suggestions.
One of the benefits of publishing Largehearted Boy is the number of review copies sent my way. More important than that has been the relationships forged with publishers and authors, who have become invaluable both in titles to feature on the website and to read.
Websites are invaluable in their yearly, quarterly, and monthly book previews. Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Millions, and Words Without Borders are my personal favorites.
How do you discover you next book?
Largehearted Likes
Sophie Brown’s review of Amina Cain’s book A Horse at Night at Astra
Fragments of moving image, performance art, paintings, etchings, and prints materialize and dissipate, and a dialogue between these impressions opens up like a portal of ambiences, coming into focus yet remaining out of grasp.
Trader Joe’s Cauliflower Gnocchi
I’m swapping pasta for more nutritional alternatives occasionally these days, and these gnocchi are healthier and almost as tasty as their potato or flour siblings. A bonus: the kale gnocchi are also good, though the “green” taste is a bit prominent.
Stephanie Gangi’s monthly column on apologies at She’s a Full On Monet
Muji Gel Ink Cap Type Ballpoint Pen
I don’t write much longhand, but I do love to doodle when I’m on a call or in a meeting (or don’t have my laptop near me to take notes). Muji’s pens are cheap and reliable, I keep a variety of colors and widths in my shoulder bag at all times.
Cafe Anne’s interview with the owner of Sweet Pickle Books
There are book-pickle pairing suggestions!
Dan Kois’s piece on what happened to poet Rod McKuen
It’s hard to characterize McKuen’s fame, with its mix of books, music, and TV, in a contemporary context. “It would have been some combination of Rupi Kaur, Jimmy Kimmel, and Ed Sheeran,” said Stephanie Burt, a poet and critic who teaches at Harvard. “He was really that level of everyone knows who this person is.”
Helena Fitzgerald on millennials growing old online
Lately, the point at which I get enough of what I wanted that I delete the app again is when I see a tweet telling me I’m old. I don’t mean it says my name or anything, but that it targets a category of people and makes fun of them for being online at all at 32, 35, 37. I get into a snarly little snit of indignance, and then I get mad at myself for getting mad, and then I delete the app and go to bed, essentially obeying the command in the tweet: Get off of the internet, you’re the wrong age to be here.
The lines are longer than they used to be, but Greenpoint’s Peter Pan bakery still serves up the best old school donuts in the city. My daily walks are often planned with a blueberry buttermilk donut stop on my way home,
Sari Botton’s newsletter offers personal interviews and essays on aging from an eclectic group of contributors. Always a must-read.
Largehearted Links
Joe Meno’s essay on hearing loss
I don’t know how to describe what it’s been like living with hearing loss other than to say it’s not the way I thought it would be. I can still hear a lot, but there are missing notes, missing words.
Tegan and Sara on their new album
So after a string of glossy synth-pop albums like 2013’s Taylor Swift-approved Heartthrob, they switched things up and hit the studio last summer with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Regina Spektor). What started as a plan to record just a few songs turned into an entire album that fizzes and crackles with a newfound scrappiness on songs like the manic “I’m Okay” or the galloping “Pretty Shitty Time.” “If we are going to make albums,” Tegan says, “we’re going to make them in a way that we never have. There’s not a traditional model for us. It doesn’t work and it bores us, and I think that’s a good thing.”
Bill Callahan reviewed his own albums
“As a whole, I can’t really wrap my head around my entire back catalog as one thing. When you look back at yourself, there are puzzle pieces that don’t seem to fit the way that you think of yourself now. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I was living in this apartment, and why would I ever live in that awful place?’ But at the time, you were fine with it. I think the records are kind of the same, especially if you’re covering that much time.”
Absolute Sons of Bitches: Global Fusion Grooves, 1970-1977, a playlist
In the interstices of the fusion revolution of the 1970s, with its fulgent synthesizers and tricky time signatures, there were artists summoning the splendid confusion of Miles’s dank, hazy masterpiece. I went looking for that sound. I found it—or something like it—in all kinds of places.
My point of entry into writing a story is usually some sort of fantasy or wish fulfillment element. That is what I try to inhabit first before I get deeper into the story. I do feel like there’s an element of wish fulfillment throughout everything I write. I have found that when you attempt to inhabit some fantasy it usually turns nightmarish. So I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is the most joyful or happiest of collections, but it has both dreamlike and nightmarish elements.
An interview with Prince Shakur
For me, I think a memoir as a form allows you to dictate themes on a different level. I think it gave me a deeper respect for what I could see as a kind of totality of my life thus far. And gave me a chance to queer some of the forms in it in a way that is interesting and necessary for people of different identities with different kinds of trauma or different notions of memory.
Latin American women writers on writing horror and fantasy
That women writers, in particular, would be the ones to traverse the more shadowy corners of current Latin American fiction is perhaps no surprise, as a groundswell of frustration against restrictions on women’s rights and rising gender violence gathers force. Across the region, protest movements driven by women have become fixtures of the political landscape in recent years.
Last Week’s LHB Features
Prince Shakur's playlist for his memoir When They Tell You To Be Good
Rita Zoey Chin's playlist for her novel The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern