Shane Jones’ new novel, Daniel Fights a Hurricane, was published last week by Penguin. Like his first novel—Light Boxes, in which a town bands together to fight the month of February—Daniel Fights a Hurricane centers on a force of nature. The hurricane takes many shapes, including a mob of angry children, a monster with sharp teeth, and the madness that may or may not be filling Daniel's head with visions. The book is filled with surreal, hallucinogenic imagery ranging from the terrifying to the hilarious—there are “banana bombs," rotten bananas thrown like grenades—that work to create a sinister, modern fairy tale, but one written for the demented adult [...]

Part of a two-week series on the pull of bad influences in our lives and in the culture.

I don’t remember all that much about my first year at university except that it was the year we converted from pounds, shillings and pence to "decimal currency." I shared ground-floor rooms, overlooking the Third Quad in college, with a bearded, bear-like chap I called (for reasons which need not detain us) Eighty Two. He was impossibly good: for all practical purposes a saint. His father ran a school for the blind. He had just spent part of his gap year (though the term wasn’t in use back then) in a 12th-century [...]

"If you think you’ve got writers’ block after 45 seconds of not writing, you don’t need an app, you need someone gently to tell you that you should consider the possibility that writing is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head. Almost always, you do eventually start to write, and it seems that you’ve been considering after all."

Rupert says he forgot meeting because it took place on his wife Wendi's boat rather than his own

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) April 25, 2012

Who gamed a substantial number of professional news-gatherers into providing free content for Twitter?

Remember back when newspapers and other organizations doubled their employees' workload? (You should, it was only like a couple years ago.) And they were all, ha ha, now you have to blog too! Or you'll get fired like all those union guys who used to run the printing plant! So that worked out pretty well actually. Worked out real good for… some people. But everyone has taken this [...]

A thing to do this coming Saturday: "Transmissions," a day-long conference on literature and the first thirty years of HIV. Three events throughout the day, at the New School's Wollman Hall:

11 a.m.: THE LITERATURE OF AIDS FROM 1981 – 1995, with David France, Michael Denneny, Larry Kramer, Sarah Schulman, John Weir, and Edmund White.

2 p.m.: THE LITERATURE OF AIDS FROM 1996 – 2011, with Rabih Alameddine, Gary Indiana, Zia Jaffrey, Amy Scholder, and Max Steele.

7 p.m. READING with Rabih Alameddine, Michael Denneny, Gary Indiana, Zia Jaffrey, John Kelly, Larry Kramer, Jennie Livingston, Amy Scholder, Max Steele, John Weir, and Edmund White.

I keep forgetting to link to this really excellent piece of writing! Aspie Rhetor is the site of a hyperlexic Asperger’s autistic English professor and ELO fan. (A love of ELO we can all have in common.) It starts here: Something transcendent happens to autistic people at the threshold of adulthood. When we turn 21, we disappear. Unfortunately for me, however, I’m 27, still autistic, and still living and breathing on this planet. Yes, my friends: I have been left behind.

Also worth reading: about "helping" people in the age of autism-related fear-mongering. It's like un-reading several issues of New York mag's parenting articles! :)

Just because an agent approaches you doesn’t mean you have a good book idea. The agent may have heard of you and figures that if you’ve written a million words online, you might be willing to publish 60,000 of them in a book. But the things you wrote might not make sense for a book. While the agent might love you and your voice, she might not be so hot on your other ideas, which can be confusing. Didn’t the other ideas come from you and your voice?

Just because you write most of a book doesn’t mean you can finish and sell a book. Doesn’t it seem like [...]

"Relationships often change people, but this was a weird one, because I was the same before and after it, but very different during." —The Lena Dunham story in the New Yorker (subscription-only) is totally worth it on a lot of levels (both "laughing at" and "laughing with," though mostly John Cook has the "laughing at" covered quite grumpily), but it's also a good addition to what I think is the best part of her projects about youth: what is it about the certain kind of person who can completely annihilate their personality because of love? I was like this when I was younger and it's completely alien to [...]