Archive for 'Books'
Ernest Hilbert interviews novelist Jennifer Egan about her book Look at Me
Share Jennifer Egan’s new book A Visit from the Goon Squad is reviewed on the cover of this week’s New York Times Book Review. Here’s an interview I conducted with Ms. Egan back in 2002 on her best-selling novel Look at Me. Ernest Hilbert: What are your principal influences? Jennifer Egan: That’s such a hard [...]
Full StoryPriceless John Berryman Interview Footage
Share This interview took place on October 8, 1970. On January 7, 1972, John Berryman jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was 57.
Full StoryHelen Vendler and Jim Cuno discuss poet Robert Lowell
Share Helen Vendler, Harvard University, spoke briefly with Art Institute director Jim Cuno about Modernist poetry before her lecture Robert Lowell and the Modern Legacy on October 22, 2009. Click here to listen to Ms. Vendler’s lecture.
Full Story
Looking for some good short fiction? Look no more!
Share I was out in Los Angeles last weekend to give a reading with Tim Green at the Ruskin Arts Club. While there, I hit a few classic LA spots, like the Rainbow Room and Book Soup, both on Sunset Strip. While there, I looked for something to read on my return flight. At random, [...]
Full StoryErnest Hilbert with Jill Alexander Essbaum at West Chester Poets House
Share West Chester Poets House Presents Ernest Hilbert with Jill Alexander Essbaum Wednesday, March 24th 823 S. High Street Poets House, West Chester University West Chester, PA 19383 610-436-3235 poetry@wcupa.edu FREE “Few poets’ roots go deeper than the Romantics; Jill Alexander Essbaum’s reach all the way to the Elizabethans. In her Harlot one hears Herbert [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #78: A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway, 1929
Share A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway, 1929. It is very possible that Ernest Hemingway’s true métier was the short story, a form in which he excelled. In fact, In Our Time went some way toward creating the type of short story that would dominate American magazines for decades to follow. He was a master [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Presents the Most Beautiful Bookstore in the World: Buenos Aires’s Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid
Share What would Argentinian visionary author Jorge Luis Borges have made of a concert hall and theater transformed into a glamorous bookstore? And what a place to do a reading. Imagine reading from that proscenium! For more on this bookstore, click here.
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #79: Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, 1922
Share Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis, 1922. It’s rare that a novel or one of its characters enters everyday language. Most people can identify Captain Ahab or Hester Prynne, and their circumstances or personalities may be summoned to make a point about obsession or hypocrisy. But only rarely does a novel get right to the heart of [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #80: A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley, 1968
Share E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #80: A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley, 1968. This fictional memoir is as breathless and manic as its author surely was when couch-surfing his way across Eisenhower’s America, steadfastly refusing to grow up, always lurking in the shadow of his beloved local sports-hero father, who died at 40. Fred, Ex, [...]
Full StoryTop Five Books Recently Published by Dead Authors
Share 5. This is Walter by David Foster Wallace 4. Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut 3. The Suicide Run by William Styron 2. My Father’s Tears and Other Stories by John Updike 1. The Original of Laura, by Vladimir Nabokov. Sure, he declined to publish it during his lifetime, but hey, he’d wanted [...]
Full StoryBooks Read or Reread for Reasons of Nostalgia by Ernest Hilbert in 2009
Share Here’s my roundup of books read in the last year. It should be immediately apparent that I have no organizational principle whatsoever. I simply grab whatever catches my eye and read it. This is most immature and unbecoming, I know, but I’ve found that if I don’t read what I like it becomes a [...]
Full Story“A voucher system based on mutual fear”: Daniel Nester Interviewed at Bookslut
Share “When I think about all the effort I put into writing poems, being a poet, reading contemporary poetry, it just makes me sick. These days, if I read a poem now of a certain kind—one that avoids feeling, a speaker, or making any connection with the reader, of which there are many—I feel sick. [...]
Full StoryErnest Hilbert’s Aim Your Arrows at the Sun Makes at Least One Annual Reading List
Share I was delighted to find myself included in this excellent list of books read in 2009 by the host of the blog withhiddennoise.com. Scan the list. I’ll post my list of books read in 2009 later this week.
Full StoryCopies of Ernest Hilbert’s Aim Your Arrows at the Sun Still Available
Share I’ve been told that some readers did not understand how to order my limited edition chapbook Aim Your Arrows at the Sun. I understand entirely. It is not a commercially published book, so though it will appear in independent bookstores in select cities and from the press’s website it will not be available on [...]
Full StorySixty Sonnets Selected as Book of the Year (Poetry) by ivebeenreadinglately.com
Share From ivebeenreadinglately.com: Ernest Hilbert’s Sixty Sonnets is exactly what its title suggests—and thus it’s a performance as much as a book of poems, showy and spectacular. From the brisk noir of “She Remembers How They Fled from the Liquor Store Robbery in New Mexico”— You’d been shot three times, soaked with tar and sweat, [...]
Full StoryKara’s Latest Creation: a Poster for Ernest Hilbert’s Reading with Mark Schorr at the Pierre Menard Gallery
Share Kara’s done it again! She’s made a lovely poster, limited to 12 copies signed by authors and promoters, for Ernest Hilbert’s reading at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, MA. Check it out! “I WOULDN’T WORRY ABOUT IT . . . IT’S NOT A BIG COLLEGE TOWN” LIMITED EDITION SIGNED POSTER ADVERTISING ERNEST HILBERT [...]
Full Story“The concern here seems to be with writing poetry, not playing the role of poet”: Alexander Nazaryan reviews the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets for The Faster Times
Share “It’s hard to believe, but poetry was once a dangerous enterprise: Plato suggested that in his Republic, poets would be banished because they were, at heart, rabble-rousers and dissimulators. What Plato couldn’t accomplish Stalin did, executing anyone who dared to cross the dictator with unflattering verse. But we, a more humane breed, would never [...]
Full Story“There was a time when difficult literature was exciting”: Lev Grossman on the Future of the Novel in the Wall Street Journal
Share There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it’s still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag. Which is probably why millions of adults are cheating on the literary novel with the [...]
Full Story“The author of the first poem, the sullen punk, aping Brando, will not make eye contact and speaks in monosyllables, yet he exudes an allure of danger, even mystery”: In Memoriam: Thom Gunn
Share From the December 2004 issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review. Thomson William “Thom” Gunn (1929-2004). It will be frequently remarked elsewhere that the past year saw many fine poets cross the bar, but only one of them devoted huge energies to poems about young men crossing barroom floors. The Anglo-Californian Thom Gunn, who died [...]
Full Story“Sky Nails” by Jamie McKendrick
Share That first day, to break me in, my hardened comrades sent me scampering like a marmoset from the topmost parapet to the foreman’s hut for a bag of sky nails. The foreman wondered which precise shade of blue I had in mind. It’s still sky nails I need today with their faint threads and [...]
Full StorySome Photos and a Fun Video Slideshow from the E-Verse Party at R.U.B.A.
Check out some photographs from the E-Verse anniversary party at R.U.B.A.! See all your favorites, Paul, Ernie, Lynn, Kara, Jessica the Contessa, Ffej, Niamh, and of course DOMO!
Full Story“These Go to Eleven” Don’t forget: Saturday, June 27th, E-Verse Eleventh Anniversary Party at Ruba
Share Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 9:00pm till . . . . we’ll figure that out that night. Ruba Hall 414 Green St Philadelphia, PA It’s been ten full years, and July 1st will start the eleventh year of continuous operation here at E-Verse Radio! Hard to believe. We wanted to have a tenth anniversary [...]
Full Story“These Go to Eleven”: E-Verse Eleventh Anniversary Party, Saturday, June 27th, Philadelphia, Hold the Date
Share Yes, that’s right, this July 1st will mark a full ten years of E-Verse Radio (and the start of the eleventh year)! We’ll celebrate with a Saturday night of drinks and music at Ruba. June 27th. 9PM. Free and cheap drinks, live music, dancing. Yeah! Ruba Hall 414 Green St Philadelphia, PA 215-627-9831 Please [...]
Full StoryHilbert Goes Electric at the Khyber Pass, and One Heckler Shouts “Judas!”
Share I performed with the band Mercury Radio Theater at the legendary Khyber Pass rock club last Friday. It was a treacherous and feral evening, kids falling down and upchucking something like poured concrete on the steps of the bodega next door, ominous hunched figures stalking through the crowd, strange doings in the toilets. A [...]
Full StoryA Short Film Based on Michael Neff’s New Novel Year of the Rhinoceros
Share Excerpt from Year of the Rhinoceros: The back-story of the Reagan Era. Fed with hope, lies, and videotape campaign pledges, the kids had come from all points, from as close as Georgetown University and from as far away as American Samoa. Like Manny, their ambitions and enthusiasm were channeled into thoughts of change, productive [...]
Full StoryTop Five Philip K. Dick Novels
Share 5. Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick (1959) 4. A Scanner Darkly (1977) 3. Valis (1981) 2. Transmigrations of Timothy Archer (1982) 1. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) Runner up: Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #86: Sula by Toni Morrison
Share Sula, Toni Morrison, 1974. This wonderful short novel might seem to draw influence from the Magic Realism trend in South American literature (then growing in popularity), but despite apparent affinities with the works of Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, Morrison’s novel probably owes more to traditional American folk storytelling and the extraordinary history [...]
Full Story“Unreal as a Song”: An evening of new poetry with Ernest Hilbert, Lynn Levin, and Paul Siegell at Head House Books
Share “Unreal as a Song” An evening of new poetry by Ernest Hilbert, Lynn Levin, and Paul Siegell to celebrate National Poetry Month! Head House Books Philadelphia April 16th, 7:30PM $5 tickets in advance *04.10.08 – Explosions in the Sky – The Trocadero, PA* by Paul Siegell start slow. cinematic. three guitars, a set of [...]
Full StoryHilbert in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poetry
Share I had a pleasant surprise one day last week. After listening to Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed in the park for a while, I decided to stroll over and trawl the shelves of a local bookstore. I was poking around the poetry section and came across a book edited by Dennis O’Driscoll, called [...]
Full Story
