Pioneer High School students Carlina Duan and Allison Kennedy sit down with famed Ann Arbor writing teacher and teen center director Jeff Kass to discuss his recent story collection, Knuckleheads. Kass discusses knuckleheadedness as a state of being, why being an outsider is important, the influence of Springsteen on his fiction, and the reason he wrote this book—in part—for his students. Bonus Track: an original off-the-top-of-the-dome list poem by Kass on “happiness.”

Recently a friend turned me on to Ravens & Chimes, whose first album happens to be titled “Reichenbach Falls”—which, of course, is a reference to the famous site where Sherlock Holmes “died” only to be resurrected by Arthur Conan Doyle after years of reader heckling. This sparked a bit of my own sleuthing on the [...]

Founded in 2009, Fogged Clarity is an online, non-profit arts review that incorporates visual art and music in addition to fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, reviews, and original multimedia content. The “Fogged Clarity Sessions,” for instance, feature musicians visiting the studio to record several tracks, mostly acoustic.
Writes executive editor Ben Evans:
I have always believed that [...]

Jennifer Solheim weaves the story of her decade-long translation of Yolaine Simha’s I Saw You on the Street into a meditation on the nature of the translator’s labor. Solheim looks at history, politics, time and rereading to parse how “translation can become a snake biting its own tail: the translator as writer and reader is simultaneously subsumed and resurrected by the text in the original.”

“Writers can almost be defined as professional outsiders. It’s part of the job. You often have to step outside of a situation to observe it—to choose the right details—to reshape a mess of events into a narrative.”

In a generation of “Pointers,” the relationship between and among songs on an album—its narrative—is all but lost in favor of hit single after single. But in Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, an array of stories mix into a cohesive novel, each chapter self-contained yet fluid as the grooves of an LP.

If William Faulkner were a rapper, who would he be? (Or, if you prefer, if Lil Wayne were a writer, who would he be?)
Flavorwire matches famous rappers with their 20th-century literary doppelgangers with surprisingly apt comparisons:

Ja Rule = Jay McInerney
In the 1980s, McInerney was a fresh-faced up-and-comer whose novel Bright Lights, Big [...]

There are few venues where a fiction reader might witness Steve Almond read student evaluations of his teaching (youth can be so cruel), Samantha Hunt perform a poem – backwards, or Ben Greenman’s utter faith in humanity as he recites his credit card and pin numbers aloud to a packed bar. In fact, the only [...]

Ever wonder what happens when literary professors make music? Glass Wave is what happens. Composed of four literary scholars—Thomas Harrison of UCLA and Robert Pogue Harrison, Dan Edelstein, and Christy Wampole of Stanford—plus drummer Colin Camarillo, Glass Wave has just released its first, self-titled album, with songs based on canonical Western literature.
Inside Higher [...]

An Unfinished Score
by Elise Blackwell
Unbridled Books, April 2010
256 pp
Concert violist Suzanne Sullivan is preparing dinner when she hears on the radio that her long-term lover Alex—a well-known conductor—has perished in a plane crash. Living with her husband (a composer), her best friend Pertra (a concert violinist) and Petra’s deaf daughter Adele, Suzanne is forced to [...]