LITTLE BROTHER

Once more, with feeling.

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:43:52 -0400

We’re doing it again, and this time we’re laughing all the way to your doorstep. Little Brother No. 2, the JOKES issue, drops on May 1st, but you can be sure to get your issue before it hits very select news stands by subscribing. Just $50 for four issues over two glorious years in Canada and the US of A, or $75 anywhere else in the world.

LBNo.2 has stories from Mariko Tamaki, Kaya Genç, AG Pasquella, and Sarah-Jane Ford beside essays from Peter Merriman and Alicia Merchant. (Alicia’s brilliant piece was excerpted by Joyland.) There are new photographs from Natasa Kajganic accompanied by delicious little snippets from the villainous poet Natalie Zina Walschots. We’ve also got jokes from Chris Randle, Ellie Anglin, Frida Kaufman, Cian Cruise, Josh Gilchrist, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, and Stephen Thomas. Plus a list from Shari Kasman of the silliest, most Canadian, topics covered in Canada’s silliest musical acts, and a chart from Guilliuame Morrisette.

Basically, you’re looking at a laugh and a riot all rolled up together in one beautiful little bundle of perfect bound pages. Subscribe today!

And! If you happen to find yourself in Toronto, come say hi at the launch party on May 1st? Sign up for the newsletter to stay in the loop with updates on the launch, and very occasional bulletins.

This is What's Up:

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 10:00:43 -0400

Things we’ve done in the interim between now and the last time we told you about the things we’ve been doing.

Editor Emily M. Keeler took the stage at Trampoline Hall, the non-expert lecture series started by Sheila Heti and hosted by Misha Glouberman. She talked about dads and dad jokes, using the strange career arc of Bob Saget—from Full House to America’s Funniest Home Videos to The Aristocrats—to make a larger point about sacrifice, perversion, and fatherly love. Also: Patriarchy! Thanks to curator Mark Slutsky, aka the melancholic man behind Sad YouTube, for making it happen.

Our fabulous printing partner Jp King, at Paper Pusher Printworks, recently cut it up (while wearing a red hat) at the Gladstone as part of the Madeleine Collective’s 12 Hr. Zine Machine zine-making party for Nuit Blanche.

Which leads us to a question some have posed: Is Little Brother a zine? We’re not sure. Maybe so? Probably not? What we do know is that Emily has been invited to this year’s Canzine Symposium, where she’ll be talking about collaboration in independent culture. Or: how to spread your love, but not too thin, when Doing-It-Yourself.

One of the highlights of LB no. 1 was the photo essay of tiny Toronto houses by Elissa Pearl Matthews, with fictional captions by Shari Kasman. At Amazing New Stuff, Shari read from the mag—including her pieces “Take-Out Menu House” and “Mr. Extrovert’s House”—while the audience looked at giant projections of the houses.

Chris Randle’s debut story in the first issue of Little Brother Magazine was about a literary fan who takes things a little too far. But his recent interview, for Hazlitt, with a verified fan fiction aficionado makes us wonder if there’s such a thing as far enough.

We’re very excited to run an arresting piece of very fannish fiction ourselves, in LB2, and we’ve hand picked A.G. Pasquella to do the honours. (So far he has yet to touch his per diem.) You might know him from McSweeney’s, or one of his self-published books, the latest of which, NewTown, is officially launching tonight, at The Victory Cafe in Toronto. Just your typical Star Trek meets 30 Rock slice of literary sci-fi. Check out an excerpt at The Toronto Standard.

And, Andrew Kaufman, who thankfully took a little time off from working on his new novel, Born Weird, to send in his story “I Know That This is True,” is busy gearing up for the book’s January release.

‘Till then, we’ll be keeping it weird on his behalf.

It’s been a month since we launched Little Brother Magazine No....

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 10:24:00 -0400

It’s been a month since we launched Little Brother Magazine No. 1, and we’ve been lucky enough to get a li’l hype and a few shout outs.

LB landed on the front page of The Globe and Mail’s Arts section, when Sarah Nicole Prickett wrote a piece pairing Little Brother with Random House Canada’s new online mag, Hazlitt: “Both are well-designed and feel several kinds of new. Both solicit contributions from home and native landers, with few exceptions, and yet neither have that insignificance-in-a-sprawling-landscape quality associated with CanLit. Neither is boring, either.”

Broken Pencil called LB “a spirited step toward smart literary writing with an open-door policy.” When asked about LB’s design and Risograph printing method, editor Emily M. Keeler responded, “There’s no point in making an ugly print thing now, when you could just make a beautiful Tumblr.” But obviously we still hope you like our Tumblr.

In the Broken Pencil Q&A, Emily points to Steve Thomas’ LB essay, “Songs of Another World,” about the permeating influence of American culture on Canadian writing, as the impetus for issue one. The Toronto Standard was kind enough to run an excerpt.

And over at The Quill and Quire, there’s a piece called “Big Plans for Canada’s New Literary Magazine, Little Brother.” Here’s Emily again: “The idea of Little Brother is to embrace that we can be smaller and we can be unique.”

However, the LB sensibility might not be to everyone’s tastes. Peep the hilarious comments on this Masthead blog post. “Not Impressed,” upon seeing a photo from LB’s launch, writes: “sneakers and shorts? C’mon folks, personally I find it disrepectful [sic] and trying too hard to be ‘cool’. Maybe I’m getting old.”

And, finally, our favourite bit of LB No. 1 coverage, from Post City Magazine: “We have a little brother, and we also like magazines… so why not check it out?”

Thanks, everyone!

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 16:12:12 -0400

Thanks to all of our friends in Toronto for coming out to the first salon, and for taking LB home.

Here are a few more pictures from last night. If you couldn’t make it, don’t worry, you can order the mag online right here.

One of our good looking crowd:

Steve Thomas, reading his selection for the salon:

Sasha Chapin, reading his selection (believe it or not, a poem from Steve Thomas) for the salon:

Ellie Anglin, chilling our bones with some Agatha Christie:

Andrew Kaufman, charming us all with selections from the police report of the Wingham Times:

Shari Kasman extolling the virtues of mail order shopping, reading from a 1955 guide:

Lauren Mitchell, of Dragnet Magazine, dropping some Public Enemy on the crowd:

Cian Cruise reading from D.H. Lawerence’s essay on British and American literature:

Charles Yao, reading a note about Lenny Kravitz discovered between the covers of a used book:

And Tony Halmos is Joe’s Pituitary Gland.

And one more of our wonderful pals that made it our for our first salon:

Thanks everyone, we wouldn’t, and couldn’t, do it without you!

It's Time!

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 10:17:00 -0400

Dear Reader,

Little Brother Magazine launches tomorrow night in Toronto, at June Records. If you plan to swing by, we’ll be there from 6.30 until 9.00. There will be cookies and milk, snacks befitting your best li’l bro. There will be a short series of readings, too, which we’ll kick off around 7. But don’t worry! They will not be long and boring readings. They will be short ones chosen to excite and intrigue.

In fact, you’re welcome to bring one. The launch party also marks our first salon. Shamelessly inspired by The New Inquiry’s legendary salons, the LB launch will feature short previously published artifacts read out loud by our contributors and friends, and, just like in the magazine (which you can get there in the corporeal realm, or here in the digital one), are pieced together by the theme of those pesky junior family members. If you want to read simply pick something that addresses the theme, make sure it takes you less than 3 minutes to read, and come by.

Ian Cheung and Peter Merriman will both be spinning vinyl throughout the night. LB’s editor tried to convince them to play exclusively Li’ls B, Bow Wow, Wayne, and Kim but they seem to have arrived at their own ideas.

If you come to the launch, you’ll also be able to purchase this limited edition poster for Little Brother No. 1, for a very economical $8. And it’ll be the only place you can get ‘em, so get ‘em while they’re hot.

If you do the Facebook thing, that’s great. Here’s the info there. If you don’t, that’s totally fine, too. We’d still love to see ya tomorrow.

Yours now to hold,

Little Brother

POSTCARD: Emily Schultz

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 09:21:00 -0400

I grew up both Canadian and American, in Ontario right on the Michigan border. As part of the post-Trudeau curriculum I read Canadian literature at school but usually American literature at home. Then as an English major in university I took a number of CanLit courses and on my own began reading Canadian literary journals; all my friends were well read so I didn’t think of American literature as being of any more important than Canadian. It wasn’t until I moved to Virginia after graduating that I realized the relationship was less than balanced. The two Canadian authors that were universally known there were Atwood and Ondaatje.

When I started Joyland many years later with Brian [Joeseph Davis] it was because I felt we could stand to read more cross-border fiction in both directions. I think the problem goes both ways—there are also a lot of great American writers who go unread in Canada.

I owe my career to Canadian publishing and Canadian readers. But my family is from Michigan and Ohio, so I’ve never felt the pull or pressures of Britishness. Trust me, the Guardian just ain’t read that much in Ann Arbor.

Emily Schultz, co-publisher of Joyland, and author of Heaven is Small and The Blondes, which launches in Toronto next week.

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This is the sixth in a series of postcards sent to LB in anticipation of Steve Thomas’s essay “Songs of Another World,” which will appear in in the first issue. Get yours here.

POSTCARD: Philip Marchand

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 08:45:00 -0400

When I first started writing, in the 1970s, Canadian writers were very aware of the desireability of having an American publisher and obtaining reviews in major American media outlets, primarily of course the book review section of the New York Times. Obviously Canadian writers wanted access to that expanded market of American readership, but also American critical attention was very important, a kind of seal of approval that the writer in question was now playing in the big leagues.

To some extent this situation still obtains, American publishers and review outlets, mostly but not entirely in the print media, are still the gatekeepers to literary reputation, in the United States and Canada. But the Internet has also changed the landscape. Literary web sites can pop up anywhere, and bloggers can put forth their message from any point in the continent. The geographical or physical address of the web site or the bloggers hardly matters. We are all, as Marshall McLuhan used to say, part of the global village. Writers are now obligated, in this world, to blow their own horns, create their own publicity, conjure forth their own audiences. In this world, national identity means less and less.

Philip Marchand, author of Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America, and Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature, among other books.

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This is the fifth in a series of postcards sent to LB in anticipation of Steve Thomas’s essay “Songs of Another World,” which will appear in in the first issue. Get yours here.

POSTCARD: Sean Dixon

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 09:32:00 -0400

If I had been alive in the early 1600s, I hope I would have followed the work of both Shakespeare and Cervantes, even if I had been living in Sao Tomé and Príncipe. That might have been impossible then. It’s not now. Today I admire the work of Sheila Heti, which would have been completely ignored in Canada had she not consciously engaged with American Culture, specifically McSweeney’s, back in 2000.

Sean Dixon, author of The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn and The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, among other books and plays.

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This is the fourth in a series of postcards sent to LB in anticipation of Steve Thomas’s essay “Songs of Another World,” which will appear in in the first issue. Get yours here.

POSTCARD: Angie Abdou

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 07:00:00 -0400

I have deliberately set out to write very Canadian novels. My exposure to “American culture” is minimal: I watch practically no television and see very few movies; I read mainly Canadian literature. Early in my writing career, I was influenced by Robert Kroetsch’s statement that Canadians have an invisibility complex and that Canadian literature can work as the antidote. Kroetsch argued that Canadians did not see their own experiences reflected in the television they watched, the movies they saw, or the literature they read. If they didn’t see themselves reflected, how would they know they existed? That sentiment rang true for me because I remember my enthusiastic discovery of Canadian prairie writers and the thrill of learning that good fiction could be made from the kinds of people and places I knew so well.

So I set out to do that for readers - to write novels grounded in specifically Canadian experiences. My first novel focuses on Canadian amateur athletes (swimmers and wrestlers) and my second on mountain ski towns and ski culture. I didn’t think at all about how my work responded to American culture or what Americans might make of my work. I thought only about Canadians. If asked, I probably would have said that I didn’t expect to have many American readers, nor would I have expected most Americans to be interested in my work. I would have been wrong.

The Bone Cage, my novel about Canadian athletes, is taught in sport literature classes throughout the USA (e.g. Ohio, Kansas, West Virginia, Massachusetts). I frequently visit these classes via Skype, and the students are very engaged, though they do some times take offense that the only American character in The Bone Cage is pumped full of steroids and warms up for his matches by ramming his head into a cement wall. My second novel, The Canterbury Trail, seems to resonate just as strongly with mountain readers in the United States as it does with mountain dwellers in Canada. To be honest, there is not a marked difference between a community like Whitefish, Montana (for example) and one like Fernie, BC (for example). The issues this book raises around identity politics, tourism, our relationship with nature, and ownership of place apply just as well on either side of the border, within certain communities at least. I guess that proves that there are ways to divide potential readers that have nothing to do with national identity/culture. I claim to have put myself in this little Canadian bubble and immersed myself in particularly Canadian concerns, but in reality I live thirty minutes from the border. It would be naïve to think that what happens on this side of that imaginary line is different than what happens on the other side.

Angie Abdou, author of The Bone Cage and The Canterbury Trail.

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This is the third in a series of postcards sent to LB in anticipation of Stephen Thomas’s essay “Songs of Another World,” which will appear in in the first issue. Get yours here.

POSTCARD: Natalie Zina Walschots

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 08:57:00 -0400

Canadian artists, and writers in particular (I say in particular not because they are more predisposed but because I am most familiar with them) seem to have a lot of anxiety about asserting, defining and discussing their Canadian-ness. Because Canadian and American culture are so distinct from each other in so many key socio-political ways, but they tend to be ineffable things, difficult for language to describe. Beyond differences in the government and legal system and health care, most of the differences have to do with attitude, feeling, atmosphere, and aura. Language has a hard time sticking pins through these things. So we spend time with the things we can define and experience: the Canadian landscape. The Canadian cultural experience. The quest to define a Canadian sense of self. Over and over again, we talk about the rural vs. the urban landscape. The sense of place. The construction of identity.

When it comes to popular culture though, we shy away. Even our own celebrities seem to become absorbed into the larger ‘American’ cultural milieu, and so we regard them with distrust; they are ex-pats as soon as they become famous enough. Popular culture seems very American to a lot of writers, and so they’d rather not really engage with it.

But Canadians make comic books and television shows, blockbuster films and top ten records. We are responsible for Justin Bieber and the Canadarm, Celine Dion and even a little bit of Superman by way of John Byrne. We are as part of popular North American culture as any resident of the U.S., and ignoring that simply because it has blended or become nebulous doesn’t seem fruitful to me. Canadians make that culture, and parsing out exactly which parts, how many ppms are Canadian doesn’t seem like a useful job to me. But, engaging with that culture sure does. Writing a poem about the Canadarm sure does.

Natalie Zina Walschots, author of DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillians and Thumbscrews.

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This is the second in a series of postcards sent to LB in anticipation of Stephen Thomas’s essay “Songs of Another World,” which will appear in in the first issue. Get yours here.

Modular People

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 08:47:00 -0400

By Andrew F. Sullivan

We start as a pile of heads because this is how we always start.

We could be anything you want. Dress us as you will in armour and space helmets and cowboy hats or whatever you can fashion from the interlock surrounding you on the bedroom floor. There are witches and robots and even tax collectors lying in wait amongst the tide of red, yellow, blue and white. Black and gray pieces sway along the edges. You can find our bodies in the rubble. We come apart into seven pieces if you include the hands. Watch your feet and your precious toes. Beware any and all errant blocks; their edges have no sympathy.

Our faces are set in place. Our sneers are unmitigated and our grins are implanted in far off factories in cities you can’t name because you don’t speak Hungarian or Danish. Pile the heads on top of one another. Even our skulls are bricks in your hands. Count the nubs. Count the hands and the weapons and the flowers we carry in our firm, unyielding grasp. Your only limits are the constraints of our form. Build within your limitations. Learning is useless without a firm line to rail against; a failure of imagination only creates more opportunity for excess, for mistakes, for faulty structures without foundations. We are each yellow underneath it all—except for the trademarked among us, the Aragorns and Indiana Jones muddying the waters. Even with these interlopers, our parts remain interchangeable. We accept all of those who fit our measurements, our form. We are a people in pieces—all of our joints remain exposed.

We are the children of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. Our prayers are made of copolymer. Our relatives include kitchen appliances, luggage, sewage drains and the bumpers of discount cars. They lack our utility, our endless permutations. Endless sounds like we are without limits, sounds like we are bragging. We are endless, but only within our narrow definitions: There is no space for a third arm in this universe. There is no way to break that code. Our legs are delivered as one singular piece. They do not come apart without rupturing some fine line. You can gather us into bundles and dress us in fine capes made of Kleenex and tinfoil. Introduce elements outside our sphere. We will still remain once all the excess has sloughed away into the bottom of this Tupperware container.

Take us apart, please. Find us new faces. Build us spaceships and rocket boots and some graves for the few of us that died inside the vacuum the one time your Mom cleaned up your room when you were sleeping at Mitchell’s place. You can do this. Find peace in our uniformity.

Remember to clean us up, to seal us away before the dog or the vacuum returns once again. We remain in stasis, our grins do not budge. We remain a unit of measurement, calibrated for bedroom kingdoms and sandboxed empires. We are a currency; we are a measure of your creative deviations. Three blocks left of the centre, two blocks north of home. You must start somewhere.

Pluck us loose from wobbly necks. Sort out our segments. Choose your pieces within our code. We are all the same size, the same design. We are the best kind of people—we all fit into the same chairs, the same spaceships, the same lives. None of us have heard of Goldilocks. We can wake up in pieces. We do not dissipate. We linger on forever, hiding in your basements, lurking in the vents and toilet pipes. We are the fallout from your childhood, but we will not decay. Our structure is sound. Our bodies are perfect. Choose a face. Choose a profession. Measure your success in bricks. Count out your failures in hands and arms and torsos. Grab a head. Begin. Begin again.

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Andrew F. Sullivan was born in Peterborough, Ontario. His fiction has recently been published by Joyland, The Good Men Project, Monkeybicycle, The Cleveland Review, Necessary Fiction and Riddle Fence. He no longer works in a warehouse or as a butcher, but is currently the associate fiction editor for The Puritan.

POSTCARD: Joey Comeau

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:50:00 -0400

It’s hard to think of “American culture” as a concept. I mean, that seems like the biggest difference to me between us and them. We have “Canadian Culture” and they have cultures. When an American writer sets a book in New York City, they set the book there. In Canada, a writer will set a book in Toronto by describing every street, every neighbourhood, every restaurant by name. They seem afraid to simply have a book be set in a Canadian city - and I used to think this was a lame bravado thing, like “I’m a fancy Toronto writer, look how many street names I know.” but since moving to Toronto, and meeting a lot of writers, I think it’s more likely that Canadian writers are honestly not sure the reader will already know what Toronto is like. Americans don’t have that self-doubt. Their attitude is - Everybody knows what New York is like. And if you don’t? Fuck you. You probably can’t read anyway.

Joey Comeau, author of The Complete Lockpick Pornography and Overqualified.

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This is the first in a series of postcards sent to LB in anticipation of Stephen Thomas’s essay “Songs of Another World,” which will appear in in the first issue. Get yours here.

The Pen is Mighter the Guitar

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 06:44:00 -0400

Bono and Salman Rushdie, 1993.

By Robert Fay

Discovering The Smiths in 1980s suburban Boston was something akin to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg realizing he could remain a badly-dressed programmer and be a billionaire. The Smiths bridged the gap between my adolescent crush on bands like The Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen and my deeper, nearly maritally commited devotion to the novels of W. Somerset Maugham, D.H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. This may seem like a rather insignificant achievement, but in the Boston of my youth rock n’ roll largely meant shop kids who drove Camaro Z-28s and wore tattered Ozzy Osbourne concert t-shirts. And while I’m not familiar with the complete Ozzy discography, I feel safe in assuming there are relatively few songs referencing, let’s say, the works of fellow Birmingham native W.H. Auden.

In The Smith’s song “Cemetery Gates,” Morrissey sings, “And I meet you at the cemetery gates; Keats and Yeats are on your side; But you lose; ‘Cause weird lover Wilde is on mine.” After a few listens, I realized it was true, there were other odd ducks like myself, stoned on the romance of literature and music and beauty. I must confess, however, I’ve never had much use for John Keats or William Butler Yeats, but Oscar Wilde and De Profundis occupy a hallowed position in my adolescent pantheon alongside Walden and Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (I was admittedly an eclectic reader).In fact, anyone who claims they don’t love Oscar Wilde should be whisked away and imprisoned in the nearest 19^thCentury English gaol, or Guantanamo Bay, whichever is closer. Yet the point is not precisely which writer Morrissey was singing about, but simply that a pop singer was stating his communion, not with groupies or the almighty dollar, but with literary culture.

When I was a kid, the world of letters was already obscure, but not entirely invisible. My mother, who was by no means a serious reader, bought the occasional John Updike or Norman Mailer book because they were on display at the drugstore. When I was in high school, I could find almost any book I wanted by driving into Harvard Square and shopping at half-a-dozen used bookstores. Today, such anecdotes sound as dated as horse-and-buggy tales, because pop culture is the only culture common to everyone (in the 1950s a lot of “regular” folks had heard of conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein. How many people today know of his artistic heir Michael Tilson Thomas?). It’s entirely understandable that classical musicians, poets, visual artists, writers and painters would envy (even if secretly) the attention lavished on rock musicians and Hollywood actors. Yet when novelists metaphorically don leather pants and grow their hair long, the resulting pastiche of rock n’ roll and literature is generally to the diminishment of the latter. A recent example is the talented memoirist Mary Karr, who just released an album of music she co-wrote with singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell. I can’t help wondering, why would anyone who could write a book as impressive as The Liar’s Club, spend time doing anything else but crafting prose? Maybe she is equally talented with penning lyrics, I don’t know, but for me it comes down to a question of utility: here in the literary desert, we can’t have our best engineers collecting rock samples all day when they should be drilling for water.

Let’s be clear at this point: I love rock music and it has an important place in the popular culture, but literature and popular music have different capacities; this is more a separation-of-church-and-state argument, i.e., keep your three-chord rock out of my books! And while I can be counted among those who consider The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to be a work of art; I will never be able to wring from it the kind of richness and profundity about the human condition that I can from The Brothers Karamazov. To put this in Buddhist philosophical terms—how very George Harrison of me!—rock music is truly the Hinayana or “lesser vehicle” of the two art forms.

I spent the 1990s listening to Nirvana, REM, Radiohead and Pavement, among others, and it was time well spent. I was also fortunate to have a friend recommend a strange and sprawling new novel called Infinite Jest. There was a kind of magical electricity to that book; it seemed to be about everything, and I marveled at its marriage of writerly erudition and deeply human pathos.

One hundred years from now, when cultural historians examine the recent fin de siècle we’ve just passed through, my favorite bands will be odd, unfamiliar cultural relics to these men and women, but the name David Foster Wallace? It will be known in the way people today, even if they aren’t readers, know names like Henry James and Edith Wharton. This kind of staying power, at the end of the day, is the unique province of literature.

The late literary critic Lionel Trilling gave much thought to literature’s place in the larger culture. In 1950 he wrote, “the emotional space of the human mind is larger, but not infinite, and perhaps it will be pre-empted by the substitutes for literature—the radio, the movies, and certain magazines.” He also added that “generally speaking, literature has always been carried on within small limits and under great difficulties.” In other words, writing a novel is unlikely to garner one the attention or money Lady Gaga receives. And while it is unfair to suggest authors have been consciously trying to “hitch their caboose” to the cultural juggernaut of popular music, it is clear some writers look more to their iTunes library than the Western Cannon for inspiration. “Contemporary writers do not like to be told they must compete with Shakespeare and Dante,” writes critic Harold Bloom. “And yet that struggle was (James) Joyce’s provocation to greatness.”

Most readers can rattle off a list of favorite novels that deal with rock n’ roll in one way or another: The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie; Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo; High Fidelity by Nick Hornby; The Commitments by Roddy Doyle; and A Visit To The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. The Guardian also ran an interesting list of rock novels curated by novelist Tiffany Murray in 2010.

Yet this this authorial fascination with popular music, as in the case of Mary Karr, is increasingly not limited to thematic elements in their books. A 2008 story in the New York Sun begins with the snappy introduction: “Inside every celebrated Brooklyn novelist is a songwriter struggling to break free.” The story goes on to detail the collaboration between novelist Jonathan Lethem—who wrote a rock book of sorts in Fortress of Solitude—with Walter Salas-Humara of the Silos under the name “I’m Not Jim.” The album is called You Are All My People and Lethem penned the lyrics. Lethem, curiously enough, is actually not the first Brooklyn writer to test his musical chops: Paul Auster has written lyrics for the band One Ring Zero and Rick Moody plays for an outfit named Wingdale Community Singers.

It’s my personal hope that novelist Martin Amis—who bought a $2.5 million pad in Brooklyn in 2010—will be so inspired by the Brooklyn literati that he’ll audition for X Factor (for you folks who spend too much time reading, X Factor is the heir to American Idol). I can only imagine the fireworks when Simon Cowell lays into Amis for his tone-deaf performance of The Clash’s 1977 classic “London Calling.”

And so, if we must choose sides as Morrissey urges in “Cemetery Gates,” then I’m on the side of literature; on the side of Trilling, Lawrence, Proust, Bloom, Wilde and Shakespeare. And as for the fate of weird, wild Ozzy Osbourne? Oh, he must be on your side—because he’s definitely not on mine.

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Robert Fay is California-based writer working on his memoir. You can follow him on Twitter @RobertFay1 or visit his website robertfay.com

Preorder your copy of LB1, or subscribe for four issues!

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 09:51:24 -0400

Preorde r your copy of LB1, or subscribe for four issues!

Endless Fascination

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 09:36:30 -0400

A Letter from the Editor:

Last month I went to see Lewis Lapham, the editor of an excellent American magazine, sit in conversation with Kyle Wyatt, the senior editor of a prestigious Canadian magazine. The talk was presented by Luminato, most likely on the occasion of the bicentennial anniversary of the war of 1812. The editors had been thrust into collusion at the muddy intersection of history and culture: they were to describe and discuss the relationship between our two countries, a topic of endless fascination for the those of us north of the 49^th.

A month before that I attended Raconteurs, a live story telling event held in Toronto and modeled on the American series know as The Moth. The theme that night was Travel, and we in the audience were regaled with stories of plane rides, road trips, big moves and the wildernesses of the human heart. One of the hosts, and also a friend of mine, Alicia Merchant joked during intermission that it was fitting that so many of the stories were abut America, because that’s the only thing Canadians ever seem to want to talk about.

The idea has a folksy sort of anecdotal truth to it; especially in our urban centres it seems that Canadians are nearly as immersed in American cultural products as we are in the air we breathe. As an example: during his talk last month Lapham remarked that, at least during his reign as editor, a surprisingly high number of subscribers to Harpers had Canadian mailing addresses. We pay close attention to our southern neighbors, opining in our papers about their politics, about their movies and other artifacts, listening to their music and reading their books and buying their mass produced commodities. Despite our many notable differences, our shared language, geography, and intertwining histories make the border seem very porous, though the ephemeral flow seems to mostly run in one direction. Hence the anxiety.

Stephen Thomas, in the first print issue of Little Brother, has an exceptional essay describing and combating the particular anxiety of that relationship in a fresh and compelling way. He looks inside and outside of each country, inside and outside of himself, to subject that fraught nerve to some much needed exposure therapy. His provocative take is thrilling and persuasive and I can’t wait for you to read it. In the mean time I have been wondering about how other writers feel about our peculiar fraternity. In the coming weeks we’ll be publishing short postcards I’ve received on the subject here on the website. In the mean time, you can look forward to a few excellent pieces that’ll be going up here very soon: we’ll begin publishing original, playful criticism and other errata later this week. Expect a few more teasers from Little Brother No. 1 and a whole lot more. And of course, we’re always open to hearing what you might like to say, about this or almost anything else.

I exhort you to stay interested, keep reading, thinking, and, of course, playing.

More, so much more, soon.

Emily M. Keeler

Stephen Thomas, a contributor to Little Brother’s first...

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 13:22:36 -0400

Stephen Thomas, a contributor to Little Brother’s first issue, has been reciting poetry out there in the wilds of America.

GFK + CDNs

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 12:36:00 -0400

Happy Canada Day Yo… All my Canadians RT Love y’all that’s my word!
— Ghostface Killah (@GhostfaceKillah) July 1, 2012

On submitting to LB's website.

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 16:44:00 -0400

Photo by Stanley Kubrick from MCNY collection.

While we’ve received some wonderful submissions for the Little Brother website so far, we have also received a lot of questions. Questions about the kinds of things we mean when we say that we want curious, voice driven criticism, that we want pieces to investigate the bigness of the world through the smallness of its trivia. In an effort to answer by way of example we’ve compiled here a short list of pieces that we would have liked to have published:

The Grand Map - Avi Steinberg - The Paris Review Daily
The way that Steinberg begins this essay with a reference to Lewis Carol immediately sets the reader at ease; here’s something they either have or might have read in childhood. But he doesn’t labour at the metaphor he’s taken from Carol, instead he launches immediately into the present, into Google Streetview. His exploration of how Google Streetview can become not only a map for seeing the world but a picture window for looking into our personal pasts is elegant in its economy without ever being curt or heavy. Just when his musings move toward tiresome he brings in other parts of the world, art that uses the medium. The piece includes a lot of images, and because we are used to seeing them online the whole effect of the piece is one of digital at-homeness.

The Ballad of @Horse_ebooks - John Herman - Splitsider
Similar to Steinberg’s piece on Google Streetview this piece is a natural pairing of form and content: it takes something from the internet, in this case a flarfy spam bot, and investigates thoroughly in a curious and generous way, in the process creating a new internet specific thing of beauty. The fractured format, incorporating interviews, reporting, impressions, criticism and analysis is in structural mimesis with it’s subject matter: finding something meaningful in our arbitrary and digitally mediated experiences.

Dudes Act Like A Lady - Ann Powers - NPR Blog
This is a practically perfect piece of criticism. It’s personable and interpretative, hopeful and fun but never at the expense of insight. It treats something trivial (middle school kids lip synching? Sugary pop?) with a joyful sort of seriousness. And this is another example of a piece that works well as something that by design is a natural fir for writing on the web: Powers uses links and embedded videos to illustrate and nuance her line of questioning beautifully.

Interviews With The Dead - Sheila Heti - The Believer Logger
The idea behind this piece is wonderful. Heti’s refashioning of the interview from the scraps left behind are also an ambiguous comment on why we can’t leave celebrities alone, especially Marilyn, even when they’re dead. The interview process itself is also called into question by her pastiche approach to this piece, and the result is interesting and invigorating.

Heroic Tedium and Anti-Nostalgia - Rob Horning - The New Inquiry
Horning’s critical perspective is so beautifully nuanced in this reflective piece. He strikes the exact right balance between rigorously and theoretical academic thought and personal, soulful reflection. Plus: “Fuck you, here’s a rainbow.”

On Being Kittenish - Nyla Matuk - Ryeberg
Matuk’s got a really good sense of questioning here and a great last line. The way she uses the (then) to-the-minute Mad Men clip to segue into her own past and also the other, older films is elegant for its lack of contrivance. It flows naturally and her refusal to draw conclusions is welcome.

If nothing else: happy reading!

"The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured, but I do think we’re working in the margins,..."

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 12:59:00 -0400

“The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured, but I do think we’re working in the margins, working in the shadows of the novel’s greatness and influence. There’s plenty of impressive talent around, and there’s strong evidence that younger writers are moving into history, finding broader themes. But when we talk about the novel we have to consider the culture in which it operates. Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the novel that tries to be equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture. This is why books such as JR and Harlot’s Ghost and Gravity’s Rainbow and The Public Burning are important—to name just four. They offer many pleasures without making concessions to the middle-range reader, and they absorb and incorporate the culture instead of catering to it. And there’s the work of Robert Stone and Joan Didion, who are both writers of conscience and painstaking workers of the sentence and paragraph. I don’t want to list names because lists are a form of cultural hysteria, but I have to mention Blood Meridian for its beauty and its honor. These books and writers show us that the novel is still spacious enough and brave enough to encompass enormous areas of experience. We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.”

- Don DeLillo, 1992 (via an email from Pasha Malla)

Congratulations to Peter Merriman, our very first subscriber!

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 15:51:01 -0400

If you’re jealous, and you should be, well take some solace in this: by the end of this week you’ll be able to buy your very own subscription to Little Brother Magazine.

And if that doesn’t particularly soothe you, please enjoy this photo of Norm MacDonald, a true terrorizer of little brothers everywhere.