Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘lit and music’

Shop Talk |

Rock Bottom to be adapted as musical

by Celeste Ng

FWR Contributor Michael Shilling‘s debut novel, Rock Bottom, will be adapted into a stage musical by the Landless Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.! The novel—and the new show—tells the story of the Blood Orphans, a once-great rock band, in Amsterdam on the last day of their final tour. The musical is a collaboration between Shilling, playwright/composer Andrew Lloyd Baughman, and songwriter/vocalist Talia Segal. It runs July 15th-August 7th at the D.C. Arts Center. And, as befits a show about a rock band, it contains explicit language, graphic adult situations, and nudity—so what are you waiting for? For more information, including […]


Shop Talk |

Joyce, Twitter. Twitter, Joyce.

by Celeste Ng

In honor of Bloomsday, the literary project Ulysses Meets Twitter is conducting an online reading of Joyce’s masterpiece today (@11ysses). Says the project’s website: This is not an attempt to tweet mindlessly the entire contents of Ulysses, word-for-word, 140 characters at a time. That would be dull and impossible. What is proposed here is a recasting or a reimagining of the reading experience of this novel, start to finish, within the confines of a day-long series of tweets from a global volunteer army of Joyce-sodden tweeps. Can you imagine such a thing? Would it be horrific, a train wreck? Or […]


Interviews |

Never the Cool Kid: An Interview with Jeff Kass

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.”


Shop Talk |

Play it again, Sam

by Lee Thomas

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 interwebs. Bookride has a pretty comprehensive list of band names inspired by literature, including: The Grateful Dead (originally a book by Gordon Hall Geroud, though the band claims it was ‘the outcome of a night of stoned lexicology’) Steppenwolf (Holla, Herr Hesse!) Tears for Fears […]


Shop Talk |

Thursday Morning Candy: Fogged Clarity

by Celeste Ng

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 the most important thing a human being can do is create, and if creation is the whispering of personal truths into the commotion of existence, then I established Fogged Clarity to make those whispers a little more audible. The combination of visual art, music, […]


Essays |

The Seamless Skin: Translation’s Halting Flow

by Jennifer Solheim

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.”


Interviews |

Among Strangers: An Interview with Ruiyan Xu

by Brian Selfon

“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.”


Reviews |

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

by Jackie Reitzes

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.


Shop Talk |

Famous Rappers and Their Literary Counterparts

by Celeste Ng

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 City had just taken the New York literary world by storm. Similarly, Ja Rule exerted an iron-fisted rule over the radio waves in the late 1990s and early 2000s. McInerney and Ja Rule both celebrated cocaine culture and had an arsenal of flashy new-fangled tricks […]




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