"The Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya (who was born in Honduras, grew up in El Salvador, and now lives in Iowa City) should be much better known in the United States. Every book of his I have read in English has been differently original, differently demanding. He is an intense writer, whose short novels take fierce satiric hold of a fictional concept and squeeze and squeeze. His work is political but intimate, and no more so than in this early book, a work of homage to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Edgardo Vega, a Salvadoran professor living in Canada, returns to El Salvador to attend his mother’s funeral. In a bar, he sits and rants, for hours on end, to an interlocutor who has the author’s own name, about everything he finds detestable in Salvadoran life, from the country’s beer to its writers, from its food to its politics. It’s not the book I would recommend to a reader who had never encountered this unusual writer—that would be his great novella “Senselessness”—but it’s an interesting exercise in both imitation and self-exorcism (Castellanos Moya has said that he wrote it, in part, to rid himself of the influence of Bernhard); and if, like me, you are drawn to novelists who are bloody good ranters (Philip Roth being our great American example), you will be likewise drawn to this peculiarly compulsive novel."

"It would be easy to say I’m massively into Big Audio Dynamite - which I am - but it’s like, here’s Mick Jones, holed up in his little London studio, quietly making these records for digital download. He makes these really long songs sometimes. They’re really minimalist records. They have that kind of hi-fi, sampled guitar riff kind of aesthetic that Mick Jones is so well known for. They’re really solid records. 'The News', the opening song on this record is really great and it doesn’t really have any end. It’s like: “You know what, I’m alive and I’m really going to kick it. I got me a little song I’m going to sing.” It’s not trying to be heavy or anything: the sun is shining and everything’s groovy. He gets away with it. He gets plenty heavy in other songs. He has 11 minute songs and retells sci-fi novels! I just love those Carbon/Silicon records. He’s not shoving it down my throat or trying to have a career. He just knows how to play the guitar really fucking good and his vocals are so great. It’s not about having a great voice, it’s all what the fuck you do with it. His vocals are casual but he chooses to do that. Mick Jones is so fucking casual man. With Mick Jones there’s nuance, you either get it or you don’t."

"The first two that jump to mind are both from my formative years. One is To Kill a Mockingbird and the other was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, both of which are films that I saw at a young age. Obviously To Kill a Mockingbird is, you know, one of the great novels of the 20th century, and a beautiful film adaptation of that that I think did a great job of… I mean, this is from a current perspective, having read the book a couple of times and read the book to my kids and seen the movie. But, at the time — I don’t know how old I was, if I was nine or eleven or twelve — but I was sort of viewing it from the perspective of the kids. The whole story is told from Scout’s perspective and the other kids, and like most kids growing up, I sort of saw Gregory Peck as the film version of my dad in the good guy standing up for what’s right and doing the right thing. Yeah, just a really well-made film with characters that I think are relatable to a really wide range of people, as all great storytelling is, whether it’s a film or a novel, or whatever it is. Something that’s accessible for a variety of ages and demographics and is something that speaks to a lot of people."