Paul La Farge: Waiting for the Antioxidants to Kick In
 

News

March 22, 2013

Futuro-retrists, take note! On Monday, March 25, I’ll be reading in an evening of digital multimedia work at The Kitchen, 512 West 19th St., NYC, with Mark Amerika, Ian Hatcher, Yael Kanarek and Illya Szilak. 7pm, free. Details here.

January 14, 2013

If you happen to be in San Francisco on Wednesday, January 16th, please come to a spectacular reading at the Adobe Bookshop, 3166 16th Street, in the Mission: Stephen Elliott, Rebecca Solnit and Michelle Tea will celebrate the long existence of one of San Francisco’s best-loved bookstores, its proprietor, Andrew McKinley, and its possible transformation into a collective art space. More information is available here. The reading is at 7pm. Admission is free but you’ll want to come early: it’s going to be packed.

October 15, 2012

The Luminous Airplanes site has been revised. The story begins in a different place (although the old beginning is easy to find), and there is — finally! — a working map. This is just in time for its appearance on Very Short List.

Please take a look and tell me what you think.

September 21, 2012

Early risers take note: I'm going to be on a panel about Novels and Cities, sponsored by the London Review of Books. at the Brooklyn Book Fair. This Sunday 9/23, at 10AM, location TBA but presumably somewhere in Brooklyn. (A partial event schedule is online here.)

And this for the Albanians: on Thursday, September 27th, I will be reading at the New York State Writers’ Institute at SUNY Albany. 8pm at the University of Albany Campus Center Assembly Hall. Free.

August 12, 2012

My future-scanning device tells me that in far-off September I will be reading with Lynne Tillman and the art duo LoVid at the season opener of First Person Plural’s reading series. Monday, September 10th at 7pm, at the Shrine World Music Venue, 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. We all have theme songs. Come and find out what they are.

July 2, 2012

I have a story in this week’s New Yorker: it’s called “Another Life,” and you can read it here. There is also an online Q&A with Lee Ellis, who edited the story, and asked some very good questions about it.

May 31, 2012

This from the Dept. of Criticism: my review of Sergio de la Pava’s 700-page self-published novel A Naked Singularity (now republished by the U of Chicago Press) is online at the Barnes & Noble Review. Or honestly just skip the review and read the book, which is much better than the phrase 700-page self-published novel would make you think.

May 13, 2012

I’m going to be reading on Thursday, May 17th, as part of Albert Mobilio’s Double Take event: the idea being that two writers have an experience together and then write about it. Emily Barton and I have done something together — I won’t tell you what it is, but it’s very exciting. Darcey Steinke and Shelley Jackson have done something. Joshua Cohen and Justin Taylor have also done something. Come hear us all at Apex Art, 291 Church Street, New York, NY, at 7pm. More info here.

March 14, 2012

Jesse Miller has written an essay about Luminous Airplanes and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows in Full Stop. Here’s a short excerpt:

Luminous Airplanes interrogates the boundaries of what the novel can be and what possibilities there are for the future of publishing through its integration of online and print media. But it also provides a possible answer to what the novel can do. As I mentioned before, David Foster Wallace claims that the key textural feature of people’s experience now is the feeling of being “overwhelmed by the number of choices they have, and by the number of discrete, different things that come at them.” Perhaps, Luminous Airplanes suggests, a novel can do more than just “impose some sort of order, or make some sort of sense” of the slurry of information we are constantly barraged with, as Wallace claims, but further, can enable us as readers to engage fruitfully with that world.

Read the whole piece here.

For older posts, look here.

about

Photo: Carol Shadford

Paul La Farge is the author of three novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001), and Luminous Airplanes (FSG, 2011); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter (McSweeney's Books, 2005). He is the grateful recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

He teaches sparkler design at the Mid-Hudson Valley Pyrotechnics Institute.

 

writing

Potentially Endless

Long

Short

  • "Another Life," a short story in The New Yorker.
  • “Utopia,” an essay about utopia, in Bookforum. Warning: you will have to register with Bookforum to read this essay. The good news is, it will cost you nothing.
  • “Colors: Black,” an essay about the color black, in Cabinet.
  • “The History of The History of Death,” a story in Conjunctions, which was later reprinted in Harper’s.
  • “Destroy All Monsters,” an essay about the game Dungeons & Dragons, in The Believer.
  • Nine short stories published by the Paraffin Press, but basically unavailable until now.

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© 2012 Paul Poissel