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One brief book recommendation, once every month. Fiction and non-fiction, for the casual or voracious reader.Subscribe.
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Nuclear War: A Scenario, written by Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen, appeared on my radar through a combination of end-of-year lists (which I can't ever help but scroll) paired with the news of Denis Villeneuve potentially picking it up for a film after he wraps up Dune: Messiah; my interest wasn't just piqued—it ballooned into mushroom cloud proportions. Continue reading →
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Jesse Ball – The Repeat Room (2024)
FEB 2025A room has been erected in front of an audience. It's made of concrete, its door is thick like a vault, “a kind of killing jar”. The procedure is simple: the accused (“surplus person”) is brought into the room by two guards, long poles attached to the neck so as to keep their distance. Once placed inside the room, the door is closed. Then, slowly, oxygen is extracted from the room and everyone in attendance waits, long enough for the accused to be deceased. Clean and simple. “Try all they like, the lungs learn they have no job to do.”
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Marianne Brooker – Intervals (2024)
JAN 2025In 2022 Marianne Brooker won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize for her essay proposal, Intervals. Through this annual competition she was given the opportunity to shape her proposal into a book-length essay, to be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in February of 2024.
I picked up the book early last year, read it late-December, and it absolutely floored me. Continue reading →
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It happened, you know? It happened like anything else happens. It’s just a happening. You don’t figure out happenings.
— Bob Dylan, to a reporter, when asked to explain his popularity (1965)
As listeners, and as fans of music, we want to figure out how brilliance came to be. To find out how a fuse was lit, to learn when and where the air started crackling with a certain creative electricity. To be able to point a finger and say this here, this is it—we solved the puzzle. Continue reading →
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Samantha Harvey – Orbital (2023)
NOV 2024I could read a tower of non-fiction books about space, climate change and humanity, and they wouldn't pack the same punch as this 144-page novel. Continue reading →