An anthology of new work from seventeen writers with websites. It is available as a downloadable PDF, which requires the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view. You probably already have it. Feel free to forward, print, share, discuss, deconstruct, and/or cherish.

"Manual"

Aging acts account for most of the music industry's live performance revenue. What happens when these acts are gone?

The Show Must Go On

A photoblog of the abandoned American West.

Lost America: Roadside Gallery

One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible.

I was sure we'd covered this, but I couldn't find it.

William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview

It’s easy to forget, given the sensitivities that have been awakened in this country since 9/11, thrusting lifelong citizens under suspicion for having foreign-sounding names and subjecting visitors to the indignity of being fingerprinted, that America was conceived in a spirit of openness, as a land where people could build new identities, grounded in the present and the future, not the past. This dream, despite current fears, has in great part been made real.

A review of Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth."

American Children

Chopin, melancholy, pianos and slapstick

Frieze Magazine | Archive | Guido van der Werve

The term ‘graphic novel’ is dismissed by most of its practitioners as either an empty euphemism or a marketing ploy. As Marjane Satrapi puts it, graphic novels simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’. Moore and Satrapi, in common with many others, want their work to be known as ‘comics’. But ‘graphic novel’ can usefully designate a certain type of comic: a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoiristic or novelistic narrative, usually devoid of superheroes. By contrast, the older and more capacious term ‘comic book’ recalls the thinner, serialised, multi-authored or ghost-written publications rife with Supermen and She-Hulks. Some comics, of course, straddle (or elude) both categories; but in broad terms ‘comic book’ and ‘graphic novel’ serve to distinguish two trends in the history and form of comics.

From the recent archive:

Television was the Cold War intellectuals’ nightmare, a machine for bringing kitsch and commercialism directly into the home. But by exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically. We read the horror comics today and smile complacently at the sheer over-the-top campiness of the effects. In fact, that is the only way we can read them. We have lost our innocence.

Elif Batuman: Into the Eisenshpritz | LRB

Once Jean Nouvel examines his given conditions and decides that the best architectural solution is, say, a skyscraper without visible base and summit, or a mechanized geometric facade that casts filigreed shadows, he can get going. But to this cerebral process he appends a counterweight: the sensuous love of the material components of a building. “What I like is the poétique of the situation,” he said, in Gallically accented English. “I am a hedonist, and I want to give pleasure to other people.”

The Contextualizer

Shouts & Murmurs:

We are gathered here, way far in the future, for the funeral of Jack Handey, the world’s oldest man. He died suddenly in bed, according to his wife, Miss France.

No one is really sure how old Jack was, but some think he may have been born as long ago as the twentieth century. He passed away after a long, courageous battle with honky-tonkin’ and alley-cattin’.

Even though Jack was incredibly old, he was amazingly healthy right up to the end. He attributed this to performing his funny cowboy dance for friends, relatives, and people waiting for buses. All agreed it was the most hilarious thing they had ever seen, and not at all stupid or annoying.

How I Want To Be Remembered

The Breeders frontwoman is back with a new album—and some choice words for a fellow alt-rock star.

Kim Deal in The Hot Seat | Time Out New York