Significant Objects

Seventeenth in an occasional series.

1) Matthew Sharpe has a novel, You Were Wrong, coming out in a few weeks from Bloomsbury. Check out Sharpe’s website, on which you’ll find, among other things, videos exploring key themes and locations in the novel. Its first two chapters are being serialized this week at Fivechapters.com.

2) Susanna Daniel recently published a piece on Slate.com titled “WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?: The quiet hell of ten years of novel writing.”

3) Rachel Axler’s play, Smudge, which had its Off-Broadway premiere this past January, was just published by Samuel French. “Creepy and funny. Precise and imaginative. Parenthood never looked weirder or more terrifying than it does in Smudge” – Rachel Saltz, The New York Times

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* For more Author Updates, click here.

• Objects with “no physical use-value” but that serve “cognitive” needs. http://tumblr.com/xr4fv1wi7 #
• How to “upcycle” a book into a planter. http://tumblr.com/xr4fuwiug #
• Smithsonian videos of old “animated” books, via Boingboing. http://tumblr.com/xr4fug4lg #
• The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers by Anis Shivani : http://www.metafilter.com/94640/Overrated-Writers #
• “What to do with old college textbooks”: http://tumblr.com/xr4fj9rxt #
• Late on this, but S.O. contributor Teddy Wayne’s Postmadern Men NYer essay was funny: http://bit.ly/d4oyO7 #
• Trailer for doc about four guys shopping the “World’s Longest Yardsale,” on HWY 127. http://www.wlysmovie.com/ #
• Cool packaging/retail concept proposed by Andy Mangold, “Instant Heirlooms.” http://tumblr.com/xr4fi0gcq #
• “Truly best-dressed characters in literature,” per @awl http://bit.ly/cTOKey #
• “Why bother reading if you can see what everyone else thought were the important parts?” http://tumblr.com/xr4fbry5j #
• Big ups to friends Significant Objects, Poketo, for their new Target collab! http://tumblr.com/xr4fbl787 #
• The Book Depository map: “a boon for book voyeurs” http://tumblr.com/xr4fbeaz6 #
• Bob De Graaf’s photos: “My collection can be used to create a new order of species. http://tumblr.com/xr4fabldh #
• News of “amplified” and “enhanced” books. http://tumblr.com/xr4faaimq #

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1) On August 24, Scott Jacobson and some friends — including Significant Objects contributor Todd Levin — are publishing a humor book, SEX: Our Bodies, Our Junk (Random House). Art is by Robert Sikoryak, and the graphics minds from The Onion.

2) Laura Lippman’s fifteenth novel, I’d Know You Anywhere (William Morrow), will be published August 17.

3) Michael Atkinson’s new book, Hemingway Cutthroat (St. Martin’s), is out this month; it’s a prequel to last year’s Hemingway Deadlights. He tells us that it “bulldozes through 1937 war-plagued Madrid with Hem, Dos Passos, and platoons of nasty Popular Front bottomfeeders!” Atkinson is also reviewing movies and culture daily (for Movieline.com), weekly (for IFC.com, The Village Voice), and monthly (Sight & Sound, In These Times).

* For more Author Updates, click here.

Speaking of Rosecrans Baldwin’s new novel You Lost Me There, it turns out our friends over at Coudal did the trailer, above. Coudal explains the team-up:

[Mr. Baldwin]  wanted to use the prologue to the book and tracked down a studio where he recorded himself reading it. Sending those files over, along with a collection of amazing photos by Aya Padrón, and we got to work. Since the prologue, and the book itself, is all about memory, we built a collection of blur and flicker effects and thought gradual fades would work nicely throughout. To really make the piece work, we spent most of our time on the sound design, assembling dozens of miscellaneous audio clips in our archives and finding bits and pieces at our regular go-to: the wonderful, collaborative site The Freesound Project. We hope you’ll enjoy the end result as much as we enjoyed making it, and really hope it encourages you to pick up a copy of You Lost Me There.

Rosecrans Baldwin’s S.O. story, Praying Hands, is here.

From your friends at Significant Objects.

From your friends at Significant Objects.

1) Rosecrans Baldwin’s first novel, You Lost Me There, is coming out from Riverhead on August 12.

2) Susanna Daniel’s first novel, Stiltsville (HarperCollins), is coming out in August, too. She’ll be reading in the Midwest and in Florida, where the book is set, throughout August and September.

3) Kirsten Miller has a teen romance/thriller coming out on August 10th. The Eternal Ones is a twisted tale of true love, reincarnation, and sinister secret societies.

* For more Author Updates, click here.

• Book Sculpture by Federico Uribe http://tumblr.com/xr4fa2wvp #
• “Copyright free books summarized w/ Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function.”: http://tumblr.com/xr4f9ujho #
• 1940’s Seaman’s Savings Bank. So cool. I’d love to read a story about it! http://tumblr.com/xr4f9ug70 #
• S.O. contributor Michael Atkinson 8/13 event for new book Hemingway Cutthroat: A Mystery at The Book Review in L.I. http://bit.ly/aKuvZA #
• Rave Francine Prose review of Hans Keilson novels, one (Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel) a translation by S.O. contributor Damion Searls. http://nyti.ms/bRSeUQ #
• Google says there are 129,864,880 books in the world. The reasoning here: http://bit.ly/aqVyOU #
• New York is “suddenly, unexpectedly in the midst of an indie-bookstore renaissance,” says this: http://bit.ly/9BAJu2 #
• Latest amazing creation of Ben Greenman (@bengreenman): “Fragments of Favre, the musical.” http://bit.ly/9ZkebW #
• Celebrity gossip, culled from dreams: Dreamcrasher, by Brady Hammock, on The Awl http://bit.ly/cG36×6 #
• Nice writeup on our friend Lauren Cerand & GWN. http://ow.ly/2lpvl Via @lunaparkreview #
• Barthes in a can, and other packaged philosophies. http://tumblr.com/xr4f0fo4s #
• Metafilter points to Critters.org, “an online, highly automated fiction workshop,” for writers of “genre fiction.” http://bit.ly/bJgB8Q #

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Regency TR1 First Pocket Radio
by Mark Richards

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Moore’s law runs the computer industry and has begun to determine the pace of human life as well. As the pace quickens, we rush to embrace the future as much as we race to discard the past. The technology I’ve photographed shows just the beginning of the computer and Internet age. Generations of computer design and beauty have been lost, undocumented, and as time continues, many more generations of this hidden art will continue to be lost. I am trying to preserve and make known at least a small part of it.

In a world run by so many machines I want to show the art, history, and humanity in this technology. In the photographs, a visual parallel between the wires delivering energy to a mechanical memory and the neural pathways of human anatomy becomes apparent. The pieces of machines are re-framed as something more than cold technology; I hope I can provide emotion, unexpected beauty and history.

Sixteenth in an occasional series.

From your friends at Significant Objects.

1) Andrew Ervin published a story in Monkeybicycle last month, and — looking ahead — his first book, Extraordinary Renditions (Coffee House Press), will be out in September.

2) On August 4, Rebecca Coffey’s flash piece, “From the Notebook of John T. Cacciopo”, is appearing in Metazen. Excerpt: “Even cockroaches develop psychological problems if they are denied a normal social life.”

* For more Author Updates, click here.