Paul La Farge:upgrading to the previous version
News
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.
January 13, 2012
Hey, I am on the CBC this week, talking about what happened to hypertext fiction, and making incoherent generalizations about literature. Does appearing on Canadian radio increase my chances of getting Canadian citizenship, if something goes wrong down here?
December 22
This goes out to everyone in the Los Angeles listening area: I’ll be on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm radio program at 2:30 today. KCRW, 89.9 FM. Or listen at kcrw.com.
December 9
This just in from the office of Please Don’t Make Paul La Farge Read To Yet Another Empty Room: I will be reading on Sunday, December 18th at KGB (85 East 4th St., NYC), at 7pm. And on Monday the 18th I’ll read in the Fiction Addiction series: 25 Avenue A, NYC, at 8pm. Prizes will be given to anyone who attends both. Valuable prizes!
December 8
One morning in October, Peter Orner and I got together for breakfast in San Francisco. We talked about obsession, local politics, people kissing, and the fact that neither of us ever finished Tristram Shandy. The result of our conversation is in BOMB, on newsstands (newsstands?) December 15, or (partially) online here.
December 4, 2011
According to Flavorwire, Luminous Airplanes is one of the most “criminally overlooked books of 2011”—maybe even the most criminally overlooked book of the year. How nice it is to imagine a world where overlooking a book was a crime! We’d have to build prisons from one coast clear to the other, just to hold all the people convicted of it.
The recent past has recently been moved. You can find it here.
about
Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001), 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 a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s, Fence, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in The Believer, Bookforum, and Cabinet.
He lives in upstate New York with his army of robots.
writing
Potentially Endless
Long
Short
- “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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contact
- Questions or comments? Send them along to comments@paullafarge.com