Literary Hub shared an excerpt from Patrick deWitt’s new novel The Librarianist.
Rolling Stone interviewed Chris from Christine and the Queens.
Stream a previously unreleased Talking Heads song, an outtake from their Stop Making Sense concert film.
The Daily Beast recommended books about bars.
Pitchfork, BrooklynVegan, and Paste recommended the week’s best new albums.
The Creative Independent interviewed author Brian Dillon.
…I have tried in a way to build a writing practice and a career of sorts using a lot of what I had learned as an academic writer in my 20s, not giving up on that kind of critique, but taking it somewhere else in terms of its voice, in terms of the texture of a critical writing that’s no longer working just within the boundaries of academic language.
Elisapie shared a traditional Inuk cover of Metallica’s “The Unforgiven.”
Lindsay Lynch recommended books that deliver behind-the-scenes drama at Electric Literature.
Vulture listed the best songs of the year so far.
The Guardian Books podcast interviewed author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
Miya Folick covered Annie Lenox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” for a reproductive rights benefit album, Broken Glass.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah talked to the Guardian about his debut novel Chain-Gang All-Stars.
“As a writer and as an artist I’m interested in the different systems that trick us into stepping on each other’s heads,” he tells me, “[the ones] that convince us that someone else is less than us or more than us, that make us feel that our humanity is negotiable. And I think that the carceral state, in America in particular, is the Death Star of that enterprise, so to speak.”
Paste profiled singer-songwriter Julie Byrne.
Sarah Viren discussed her memoir To Name the Bigger Lie with Electric Literature.
Stream two previously unreleased Prince songs.
Geoff Rickly discussed his debut novel with GQ.
The Bear executive producer Josh Senior discussed the show’s season two soundtrack with Salon.
One of the most fun things to do when we’re getting notes on scripts, working through the prep and all those things is to make that playlist — [we] start playing songs for each other, trying to top one another, or drawing on things from our childhood or personal experiences that connect to the story of the show. It’s such an organic process. And it’s funny because, more often than not, that playlist ends up becoming the soundtrack for the season.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn shared an excerpt from Jan Stinchcomb’s novel Verushka.
Stream a new song by Protection (CHVRCHES’ Iain Cook and Scott Paterson).
Manhattan’s Yu & Me bookstore is holding a fundraiser to recover from fire damage.
Stream a new song by Metric.
The New Yorker shared new fiction from Ottessa Moshfegh.
Liz Phair covered Nick Drake’s “Free Ride.”
The Guardian interviewed author Hernan Diaz.
Why did you avoid dialogue almost entirely in the novel’s first half?
The first section is written in this hyper-careful turn-of-the-century prose, but there’s a punk-rock provocation at its core. My editor said: “Do you realise there are no physical descriptions in the first part?” And I was like, yes, it’s very intentional: nobody has a body, nobody has a face, and in the first 160 pages there’s only one line of dialogue – one word, one letter, “I”. It was a formal dare, almost like an Oulipian constraint.
Stream a new song by Liza Anne.
Tor.com shared new fiction from Brian Evenson.
The Guardian profiled Ethel Cain.
Literary Hub interviewed poet Sara Deniz Akant.