Mark Maggiori’s perverse take on the American West.
music writing, fiction writing, sandwiches, compliments for other people
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molly mary o'brien
• about me
• published
molly mary o'brien
Michael Robbins: books you need to read in yr 20s
BuzzFeed included my book, Alien vs. Predator, on their list of 65 Books You Need to Read in Yr 20s. This was very kind of them (although I didn’t read my book in my 20s). But I hope no twentysomethings are taking BuzzFeed lists seriously…
Michael Robbins doesn’t think you need to read the books on Buzzfeed’s list. He wants you to read “Joyce, Whitman, Stein, Emerson, Nietzsche, Plato, Dante, Hegel, Williams, Pound, Melville, Kant, Marx, Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Wordsworth, Bishop, Donne, Johnson, Blake, Rilke, Shakespeare, Celan, Susan Howe, Dickinson, Keats, Beckett, Faulkner, Benjamin, Thoreau, & about a hundred other writers who aren’t on this list.”
Which is great and fine. Those are all incredible writers. But Buzzfeed’s list includes books by people of color, books by gay writers, and many, many books by women. Genre fiction, groupie memoirs, Strunk and White. It’s diverse and comprehensive and irreverent in a way that a lot of reading lists aren’t. Big ups to Doree Shafrir for this one. And I think we can all agree that a world in which someone consumes Kant and Emerson while also enjoying a nice trashy read like I’m With The Band is not a bad world.
A SKULL WITH SNAKES + fiction by Molly O’Brien | HOUSEFIRE
“Few things are more uncomfortable to wear than a t-shirt soaked with tears.”
HAPPY FRIDAY! We are so happy to give you A SKULL WITH SNAKES, new fiction by Molly O’Brien. Enjoy!
OOOOWEEEE I have a story up at HOUSEFIRE today.
It is about “people” and “drugs.” Happy Friday!
This is a pillow stuffed with shredded documents, part of Casey Gollan’s senior show at Cooper Union that documents the massive fuckups in leadership and governance that have led to the school’s plans to charge tuition for the first time beginning in 2014.
Free Cooper Union have been occupying the president’s office and documenting the occupation on Twitter. I’ve never seen something so simultaneously devastating and inspiring: devastating to watch Cooper bilk deserving students out of an incredible free education, inspiring to see the protest and art that has emerged from such a shitty situation.
There’s a sign outside of Casey’s show at the Foundation building on 7 E. 7th St. that reads “I don’t have $20,000, I’m 18 you dummy.” Perfectly stated—now it’s time for people to pay attention.
I feel like LK Shaw is a writer who understands the art of immersion: the act of immersing, and the state of being immersed. The recorded poetry + Bill Evans muzak, the spliced ‘n’ diced classic authors + magazine-collage images—“Can You Imagine” is not content to let you sit, skip and skim. A truly lovely piece of art.
Left to right: Junot Díaz, Rick Moody, Edwidge Danticat, David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, George Saunders. From a photo shoot for The New Yorker’s Twenty Best Writers Under 40 issue, 1999. Holy shit.
wot i’ve been writing lately
a review of a book about restaurants
a li’l story about a crazy dude
a post on one of my favorite poems ever over at Banango
Yesterday I walked around the Dieter Roth MoMa show, agape. The books were groovy. The die-cut comics were sick. The screen-printed city portraits were tasty. The rabbit turd shaped like a rabbit was….well….yeah, it was pretty great.
