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Category Archives: literature

KAFKAESQUE ABSURDITY

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Kafkatrax is a strident avant-garde project accumulated from three 12″ EPs released in the last few months. In this creative endeavor, Wolfgang Voigt restricted his sampling to one kick drum and a Kafka audiobook, somehow warping the words into fleeting harmonies, melodies, and unintelligble vocals. The result is thoroughly disturbing, but totally groundbreaking techno. The ‘Mehrfachkünstler’ [...]

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‘The Readymades’

Friday, October 21, 2011

John Holten’s ‘The Readymades’ has been a silent companion during the last 6 weeks and the back-and-forth 6000 kms travelled during that time. Nevertheless, it was not until recently arriving in Paris airport, city where coincidentally the novel begins, that we started a proper and pleasurable conversation.
The novel takes upon the story of John Holten, [...]

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VIRGINS, HERMAPHRODITES AND COLLEGE GRADUATES

Friday, October 7, 2011

It’s been almost 10 years since Jeffrey Eugenides wrote Middlesex. Finally his new novel was published, called The Marriage Plot (I haven’t read it yet). The protagonists are college graduates this time – which doesn’t mean it will be less interesting than his previous novels, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. There’s hardly a writer that [...]

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Michel

Thursday, September 29, 2011

So, I finally got around to reading Houellebecq. All the hip kids, you see, were talking about it.
These books are pretty savage. James Wood points out that Michel Houellebecq ‘has the nihilist’s power to stain the fabric of life so utterly that most other contemporary writers seem by comparison sentimental and untruthful’. But I’m not [...]

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Lydia

Friday, September 16, 2011

Here is a little story from Lydia Davis to see out your week.
Interesting
My friend is interesting but he is not in his apartment.
Their conversation is interesting but they are speaking a language I do not understand.
They are both reputed to be interesting people and so I’m sure their conversation is interesting, but they are speaking [...]

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LAST CHANCE: MONO.ARCHIV #01

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

There are less than 10 of our limited edition box sets left, so hurry up and get it!
mono.archiv #01 – containing issues mono.kultur #1 to 15, a whopping 14 of which are out of print:
Carsten Nicolai
Frank Leder
Nine Inch Nails
Zeruya Shalev
M. Cattelan, M. Gioni, A. Subotnick
François Ozon
Matias Faldbakken
Wolfgang Voigt
[...]

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history and imagination

Friday, September 9, 2011

The International Literature Festival Berlin has kicked off with an impressive program of 180 events over 11 days.
Tonight Javier Cercas reads from and talks about his latest book The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination. Read Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ excellent review in n+1.

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Missing someone is like what the wind feels like to itself

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

More things to do when summer is letting you down: Get Mark Leidner’s incredible book of aphorisms entitled the angel in the dream of our hangover, out now via Sator. Here’s three of them: 1) anything worth doing is worth taking your lifetime to do; 2) a question mark, like a glassblown exclamation point, takes [...]

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FIRST READING

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Syliva Plath’s novel The Bell Jar was the first dangerous book that I ever read. This was the book that taught me that I should guard myself against literature, because novels will speak to me directly in the hours before I go to sleep, they will use my own voice, and they may never directly [...]

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making up stories

Saturday, July 23, 2011

We love a good interview, and this one is wonderful. John Gardner was a novelist and critic, but he was also a teacher and a human, in the very best way. His writing about writing is generous, practical and principled. The Paris Review compiled the interview from four separate interviews conducted by Paul F. Ferguson, John [...]

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