Soft Skull News

30% discount for the holidays, plus a free copy of Sparrow's Yes, You ARE A Revolutionary for anyone who places an order between now and Dec 21st!

For the inner curmudgeon Burn Christmas Burn
For the haiku lover Did I Wake You?
For the ranter What Would Bill Hicks Say?
For the gamer Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels
For the child (inner or otherwise) The Saddest Little Robot
For the GLBTQ in your life (or for the 70's prom photos...): Kings and Queens: Queers at the Prom
Cause there was a New Orleans before Katrina, and there will be one after The Neighborhood Story Project
You wanna make a movie in 2007? Putting the Pieces Together: The Graffiti Model for Indie Filmmaking

Plus the subscriptions are still the best deal out there! No discounts there unfortunately, cause it's already such a kick-ass deal, but we'll still give you Sparrow's Yes, You ARE A Revolutionary

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Video haiku from Beth Lapides...

For the backstory to this particular hakiu, you can check out Beth's MySpace blog:

This haiku is about speaking clearly. The universe is very literal. A friend of mine recently kept saying I need a break I need a break I need a break. She broke her foot.

For years I kept saying I want to be on Conan. I want to be on Conan. Then one day I find myself sitting in the guest chair on Conan..s set. And there he is. Conan O..Brien, right behind the desk. And he is laughing and we are talking. The cameras are running. BUT THERE IS NO ONE IN THE AUDIENCE AND THE INTERVIEW IS NOT BEING BROADCAST! I am interviewing him for my project The Other Network. I wasn..t clear enough about wanting to be on Conan, while it was being televised!

Be specific. It
helps you clarify. It helps
others understand.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nice mention of both Oh Pure & Radiant Heart and American Genius A Comedy by the Scotsman’s critic, Stuart Kelly...

But the major developments were all transatlantic. The old guard gave a very poor showing, with John Updike's flaccid take on fanaticism (Terrorist); a rather paint-by-numbers Paul Auster (Travels In The Scriptorium); a slight take on ageing from Philip Roth (Everyman) and an otiose further volume of memoirs from Gore Vidal (Point To Point Navigation). That said, the wow factor was all American.

Thomas Pynchon's Against The Day received some snotty reviews that missed the point with almost thrawn critical blindness - it's a hoot, an elegy and has a talking dog that reads Henry James. Ken Kalfus' A Disorder Peculiar To The Country managed to give an original and pitch-black-funny take of September 11, and Chris Bachelder's US! fulfilled the promise of his earlier Bear Vs Shark, imaging a world where veteran socialist novelist Upton Sinclair is back, angry and constantly assassinated. Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions was a freewheeling, psychedelic roadtrip, and easily the most gorgeous piece of book design since - er - his last book, House Of Leaves. Lynne Tillman's American Genius: A Comedy was a manic monologue (and I'm still unsure what it all meant) and Lydia Millet's Oh Pure And Radiant Heart made the most unbelievable plot (three nuclear physicists from the 1950s reincarnated in contemporary America) more than just credible: it undermined how convincingly real we are.

Also Lynne Tillman will be on KCRW’s Bookworm on 12/14/06...Check it out!

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nice piece on Soft Skull at a new quarterly magazine called Beyond Race...runs the gamut from painting, to hip-hop, to theatre, to tattooing...

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 08:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michael McColly, over at Beatrice, has an essay on World AIDS Day. A snippet:

My first World AIDS Day was in 1981, when I was sitting in a thatch hut in a small Senegalese village listening to the BBC and heard the news from America about a "mysterious virus that had been discovered in homosexual and bisexual men." I had thought I had run far enough away from my conflicted sexual life by joining the Peace Corps, but when that announcer in London let loose upon the world the word AIDS, it was as if the world had shrunk and the great African sun had turned pale.

My second World AIDS Day came on a chilly April morning in Chicago. I'd snuck out of my North Side neighborhood to a public health clinic on the near South Side to get results from a test nobody wants to take. I remember the young African American men sitting in silence with their baseball caps pulled like mine down over their eyes. I remember the voice of the Latina social worker, "you weren't expecting this, were you?"

For the next few years I didn't celebrate any World AIDS Days...

Michael's the author of The After-Death Room, which published today.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)