thebookishowl.com

Spotify is now streaming the new Daft Punk album, Random Access Memories (out May 21st).

The Guardian reviews the album.

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Urban Titan lists the top 25 horror novels for young adults.

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At the New Yorker, authors weigh in on the importance of likeability of characters in fiction.

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Two writers debate whether the Smiths were the best or worst band in the past 30 years at the Telegraph.

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Flavorwire lists 10 of the greatest Cold war spy novels.

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Rolling Stone asks, “What is the best summer song?”

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Hilary Mantel shares her reading habits with the New York Times.

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Yo la Tengo frontman Ira Kaplan talks to the Denver Post about the band’s approach to recording.

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Author Elliott Holt lists her six favorite books about expatriates at NPR Books.

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Indie band ANAMANAGUCHI fielded questions from the Reddit community.

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Zola Books interviews James Renner about his novel The Man from Primrose Lane.

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Norman Lock discusses his favorite short story at Flavorwire.

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Katie Shelly talks to The Salt about her forthcoming illustrated cookbook, Picture Cook: See. Make. Eat..

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The Thermals visit The Current studio for an interview and live performance.

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Weekend Edition interviews Colin Broderick about his new memoir, That’s That.

“When I started writing That’s That, I thought it was just a story about my childhood. And two years in, I realized — and I thought it was only going to take me two years — but two years in I realized it’s not just my story that I’m telling. And I think the book itself, it’s about personal narrative, it’s the story of a family, it’s the story of a son and a mother, but it’s also a story of Northern Ireland.”

Read an excerpt from the book.

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Morning Edition profiles singer-songwriter Sam Amidon.

Shape-note singing is a communal form of music that began in New England 200 years ago, mostly from townsfolk without any musical training. It’s music that surrounded folk singer during his childhood in Vermont.

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Five English scholars weigh in on the latest film adaptation of The Great Gatsby at The Millions.

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Amazon MP3 offers 100 albums on sale for each.
Amazon MP3 offers over 1,400 albums on sale for .99.
Amazon MP3 offers over 600 albums for sale for .99.
Amazon MP3 offers over 400 jazz albums on sale for .78.
Amazon MP3 offers over 56,000 free and legal mp3s.

---

Follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

The Daily Beast interviews author Jay McInerney about his New York.

Are there specific places you go to buy books?

Well, there were always a lot of bookstores in my area. The two bookstores that I use; first is The Strand, on Broadway and 12th Street, a very short walk from my home. The Strand is just an incredible institution, it’s four floors of books. You can get lost in there. The other place I like for my books is very tiny, it’s one small room—it’s actually the first place in New York where I ever gave a reading, with Raymond Carver, many years ago in ’84—and that’s called Three Lives. I guess it’s named after that Gertrude Stein book. It’s a teeny bookstore devoted almost entirely to literary fiction. Again, it’s just a short walk, in the other direction, from my apartment.

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Stream the new Tegan and Sara album Heartthrob (out January 29th) at Rolling Stone.

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Jeet Thayil’s novel Narcopolis has won the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

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Stereogum lists the 10 best New Order songs.

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Anthropology professor Sherry Ortner talks to UCLA Today about her new book Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream.

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BOMB shares an excerpt from Amy Fusselman’s book The Pharmacist’s Mate.

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Book Riot lists a selection of book-themed coffee mugs.

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Mike Cooley of the Drive-By Truckers talks about recording his solo album live and the changing Southern culture with CultureMap Austin.

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Weekend Edition interviews Dave Barry about his new novel Insane City.

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The Atlantic Wire examines how music blogs fell for a “Vampire Weekend hoax that wasn’t even a hoax.”

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Flavorwire lists 10 reasons poetry is not dead (a list of recently published poetry collections).

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Hype Machine has shared its weekly top mp3 charts from October, 2007 to present.

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Nerdage reports that a University of Oklahoma study shows that graphic novels may be more effective in teaching schoolchildren than traditional textbooks.

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The band Foxygen visits World Cafe for an interview and live performance.

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Forbes gathers online reactions to author Adam Mansbach’s Salon essay on book tours.

---

Amazon MP3 offers 100 albums on sale for each.
Amazon MP3 offers over 1,400 albums on sale for .99.
Amazon MP3 offers over 600 albums for sale for .99.
Amazon MP3 offers over 400 jazz albums on sale for .78.
Amazon MP3 offers over 56,000 free and legal mp3s.

---

Follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

The list of online “best of 2012″ book lists
The list of online “best of 2012″ music lists

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

The A.V. Club examines the evolution of Rage Against the Machine’s music over its 20 year history.

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At the New York Times, Darin Strauss examines the influence of James Joyce on three of 2012′s most popular literary novels.

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27 year-end music lists were added yesterday to the master aggregation yesterday, including Magnet’s best albums & reissues, NPR Music’s top classical albums, FACT’s best albums, and more.

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19 lists were added yesterday to the master aggregation of year-end online “best books of 2012″ lists, including The Economist’s best books, Brain Pickings’ best illustrated children’s books, School Library Journal’s best adult books for teens, and much more.

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The Largehearted Boy books of the year (more lists to come):

my favorite graphic novels of 2012
my favorite nonfiction books of 2012
my favorite novels of 2012
my favorite short story collections of 2012

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The Daily Beast lists eight epic Chanukah songs.

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Amazon MP3 has 22 classic R&B and soul albums on sale for .99 each.

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The Record interviews John Craig, the designer behind the cover of Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness album.

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Nokia Conversations lists five books every photographer should read.

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Billboard is streaming a new album by Wang Chung, their first in over 20 years.

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Flavorwire offers a guide to stereotype people by their favorite 2012 book.

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The A.V. Club explores the allure of the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas.

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Slate reviews Beck’s new album, a book of illustrated sheet music.

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Author Charles Yu shares a “Why I Write” essay with the National Writing Project.

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Amazon MP3 is adding five holiday songs to its free mp3 downloads every day until Christmas.

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The New Republic reviews the book The Art of the Epigraph: How Great Books Begin.

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Amazon MP3 offers 100 albums on sale for each.
Amazon MP3 offers 100 digital holiday albums on sale for each.
Amazon MP3 offers over 1,600 albums on sale for .99.
Amazon MP3 offers over 500 albums for sale for .99.
Amazon MP3 offers over 400 jazz albums on sale for .78.
Amazon MP3 offers over 33,000 free and legal mp3s.

---

Follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

The list of online “best of 2012″ book lists
The list of online “best of 2012″ music lists

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

The Millions interviews author Junot Diaz.

TM: A number of high-brow literary writers have dipped into science fiction: Colson Whitehead, Kazuo Ishiguro, and even, arguably, Philip Roth in his alternate history The Plot Against America. Do you see any mistakes these writers have made that you fear repeating?

JD: I guess my interest in the genre is actually in the genre. I don’t want to write literary fiction’s take on genre. I actually like the genre. I think that nobody who reads science fiction, no one who reads apocalyptic literature or reads alternate earth literature is confusing Philip Roth’s book for one of the classic texts in the genre. So I do think that there’s stories that are so squarely within the genre that there’s no possibility that they can be slipstreamed, that there’s no possibility for anyone to say, “Oh well this might be fantasy but it’s fantasy for the high brow set,” like someone might say about Lev Grossman’s wonderful novel, The Magicians. “It’s fantasy, but it’s not that kind of fantasy.” And I guess I’m just interested in that kind of fantasy.

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Gothamist asks indie musicians about their favorite scary movie.

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Jami Attenberg’s fourth book and third novel, The Middlesteins is published today.

The Huffington Post and Everyday eBook interview Attenberg.

At the Jewish Daily Forward, Attenberg interviews her father.

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Stereo IQ profiles John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.

“The part of me that’s in my songs is that I am a person who however bad things are going, I tend to get back up,” said Darnielle. “We live unbearably long amounts of time,” he said with a chuckle. “I just tend to keep going. Once or twice, I’ve hit depression so hard I couldn’t move out of bed, and I do know what that’s like. But for the most part, I have always been a kid who gets back up. It’s something that’s naturally occurring to me. I have a sort of persistence, and I think it comes through in the songs.”

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Book Riot interviews author Julie Klam.

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The October Music Alliance Pact shares 38 songs from 38 countries curated by 38 music bloggers.

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The Week lists seven film adaptations that betray their source material.

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Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers visits World Cafe for an interview and live performance.

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Morning Edition interviews Caleb Daniloff about his new memoir Running Ransom Road: Confronting the Past One Marathon at a Time.

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Sub Meditation Music shares its albums of the year (the first 2012 “best albums” list I have seen).

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Author Daniel Handler talks to the Telegraph and USA Today about the return of the Lemony Snicket series.

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Public Image Ltd visits The Current studio for an interview and live performance.

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Amazon now lists its 100 most popular authors.

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Spin is streaming the new Indian Handcrafts album, Civil Disobedience for Losers (out October 30th).

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Rolling Stone has added artist timelines to its website, featuring coverage of a single artist in the magazine over the years. Check out Bruce Springsteen’s.

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Win Pete Townshend’s new memoir Who I Am and a 0 Threadless gift certificate in this week’s Largehearted Boy contest.

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Amazon MP3 has over 100 digital albums on sale for .

Amazon MP3 offers over 500 albums for sale for .99.

Amazon MP3 offers over 400 jazz albums on sale for .78.

---

Follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

At the Globe and Mail, Francine Prose reviews the new Alice Munro short story collection, Dear Life.

Alice Munro has always been the poet of the unexpected passion that comes seemingly out nowhere and changes a character’s life. She understands that love can begin and end for mysterious reasons – as a consequence of chance, proximity, loneliness, curiosity – or of something even less tangible.

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Patti Smith talks to Entertainment Weekly about the film adaptation of her memoir, Just Kids.

“I remember the very first time I saw Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson together, when they were younger, and I thought, ‘Those two kids could have easily played us when they were first starting,’” said Smith. “There’s something in his eyes. And Robert [Mapplethorpe] was also a bit shy, and a bit stoic. Kristen has a very special quality. She’s not conventionally beautiful, but very charismatic.”

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The Washington Post profiles author Michael Chabon.

The BBC also interviews Chabon.

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Jimmy Flemion of the Frogs has started a Tumblr of reminiscences of the band.

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At the Guardian, 21 authors create 140-character “novels.”

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Asthmatic Kitty’s Michael Kaufmann compares running an indie record label to performance art.

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The Guardian interviews cartoonist Chris Ware.

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Speakeasy reports that Beatles manager Brian Epstein will be the focus of a forthcoming graphic novel, The Fifth Beatle.

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Capital New York profiles author A.M. Homes.

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Amazon MP3 has over 100 digital albums on sale for .

Amazon MP3 offers over 500 albums for sale for .99.

Amazon MP3 offers over 300 jazz albums on sale for .78.

---

Follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

Author Junot Diaz spins some of his favorite songs at Alt.Latino.

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Page-Views shares a literary guide to the 2012 NFL football season.

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Macleans.ca lists five films that were better than the book that inspired them.

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Guardian readers recommend songs about advertising.

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Critical Mob recommends 10 books published this fall.

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The Austin Chronicle interviews Lisa Gerrard about the new Dead Can Dance album, Anastasis.

AC: Has working on soundtracks and working in film changed your approach to music?

LG: Well, I find doing music for film really, really exhausting. It’s a wonderful experience, but you have to write a lot of music that has to work within the subtextual reality and space and time emotionally of what the director wants to create in terms of a kind of abstract literary sense. It’s very, very specific, plus you have to create the atmosphere and poetry.

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The Economist, Los Angeles Times, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal review Michael Chabon’s new novel Telegraph Avenue.

The Wall Street Journal interviews Chabon about the book.

How do you approach your research?

Writing a novel is always an education. Research is incredibly pleasurable and seductive and you have to be on your guard against it. It’s very easy to use it as an excuse not to write. There’s always one more fact that could help you and you probably shouldn’t start writing until you find out the boots worn by German troops in World War II, and if I just knew who made those boots then I could write my chapter. So you have to be on your guard against that.

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Baeble previews fall’s hottest music releases.

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Zadie Smith talks to Morning Edition about her new novel NW.

Smith says her decision to return to her old haunts for the setting of this novel was, in part, purely pragmatic. “I knew I was going to write a book which was in some ways difficult stylistically and difficult for me to write, so I just wanted to give myself a break,” she says. “I needed one thing which was stable that I knew — and the streets I do know and they don’t take research and I don’t need to use Google maps; they’re kind of a deep knowledge in me.”

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The Wall Street Journal examines the impact American punk has had on current politically active bands around the world.

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Flavorwire lists famous authors’ school photos.

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DJ and producer Erol Alkan lists his 13 favorite albums at The Quietus.

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The Rejectionist is a new literary chapbook series, the first edition will feature Lidia Yuknavitch and Vanessa Veselka.

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Flavorwire lists 10 surprisingly conservative musicians.

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Novel Sounds is a book blog that pairs a song or two with every review.

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Win D.T. Max’s new book Every Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace and a 0 Threadless gift certificate in this week’s Largehearted Boy contest.

---

Amazon MP3 has over 100 digital albums on sale for .

Amazon MP3 offers over 500 albums for sale for .99.

Amazon MP3 offers over 300 jazz albums on sale for .78.

---

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

Science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson talks to the Globe and Mail about how Rush lyrics have influenced his writing.

Even if the best-selling science-fiction author hadn’t just finished a steampunk epic based on the band’s latest album, odds are that Anderson would be thinking of Rush anyway. “Rush always has inspired a lot of my writing,” he says. When he wrote his first novel, Resurrection, Inc., in 1988, he was thinking of Grace Under Pressure, which had come out four years earlier. “As I was writing that book, Grace Under Pressure was a focal point for me, and I intentionally tried to make sure that all of the lyrics from the album showed up in some disguised fashion in the book,” he says. “Every song from Grace Under Pressure – at least in my head – inspired chapters and scenes and characters.”

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Flavorwire shares a beginner’s guide to bizarro fiction.

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The San Francisco Chronicle profiles Amelia Roskin-Frazee, a teen whose Make It Safe Project provides books with LGBT themes to schools and shelters.

“Kids look up to books,” says Amelia, a student at San Francisco’s Lick-Wilmerding High School. “They see (literature) as stories that they can believe in, characters that they can identify with. When there are no books with LGBT characters, it gives LGBT (and questioning) kids the message that it’s not normal, that nobody else is like them, that something is wrong with them. And that’s a really dangerous thing.”

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Beck’s new album, available only as an illustrated book of sheet music, is mow available for pre-order at McSweeney’s.

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Author Nathan Englander shares his first concert experience at Riff Raf.

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The Cleveland Plain Dealer interviews author Emma Donoghue.

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DC9 at Night lists 5 ways to deal with a budding music snob.

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Maria Semple talks to Morning Edition about her new novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette.

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Paste recommends 10 West Virgina bands you should be listening to now.

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The Huffington Post lists color palettes inspired by literature as a promotion for the new book Pantone: 35 Inspirational Color Palettes.

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Amazon MP3 has over 1,000 digital albums on sale for .

Amazon MP3 offers over 400 albums for sale for .99.

Also on sale at Amazon MP3 for .99: 37 children’s music albums.

---

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

The Scotsman interviews Kathleen Edwards about her new album, Voyageur.

Is this your most personal album to date?

I don’t really know how else to write songs but this time round I definitely broke the bank. I ended up writing songs about a period of my life that was really difficult. I had just split up with my partner of seven years and there is something that happens to you – you get a feeling of starting over that makes you feel ready to try anything musically.

Edwards also shares her literary influences with Clash.

Do your literary influences have a direct impact on your songwriting?

Not so much. I see songwriting as such a different craft as short stories or novels. I am in awe of the elaborate process that writing a book or short story must entail. I feel like a sprinter, and authors the marathon runners.

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The Globe and Mail offers a brief history of “great book to bad film” adaptations.

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CHARTattack offers a primer to the albums of Tom Waits.

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IGN lists the top 25 indie rock love songs.

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The National Post profiles Canadian independent publisher House of Anansi Press.

“In this commercial climate, if a writer hasn’t broken out, in terms of sales, by a certain time, the big houses do have trouble hanging on to them,” says Jackie Kaiser, a Toronto literary agent who represents Hough. A place like Anansi, she notes, can take a chance on such a writer. “So a writer who might get lost between the cracks at a big commercially driven house, like Random House, can in fact be really appreciated, and get a lot more time and attention and space, from a place like Anansi.”

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The New Yorker deciphers the rules for the Oscars’ “best original score” category.

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The New York Daily News reports that actor Billy Bob Thornton is writing a memoir, and that his ex-wife Angelina Jolie will write the forward.

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The Guardian profiles the band Sleigh Bells.

You could argue that the whole idea of Sleigh Bells depends on a considered trashiness. Their music is obnoxious and anarchic, a crossbreed of pop, beats and hardcore that’s half pumping jock-rock and half rave abandon. “Most of my tastes are middle to low,” he agrees. “I’m uncomfortable with sophistication. I’m inherently drawn to things that are inclusive like pop music. Or pizza.”

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Scholars and Rogues explores the intersection between sports and songs.

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The New Straits Times lists “gimmicky reads,” books that “successfully blend style and substance, form and function.”

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St. Vincent’s Annie Clark tells the New Zealand Herald the genesis of her stage name.

“I’m a big Nick Cave fan, and on There She Goes My Beautiful World, he’s kind of singing about the glory and the squalor of being an artist. And he sings ‘Dylan Thomas died drunk at St Vincent’s hospital’ and to me, that kind of encapsulated the darkly comic aspect of being an artist, I guess. I love Dylan Thomas and Nick Cave, and I guess it’s my subtle way of implanting myself among my heroes.”

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The Telegraph examines digital books’ current effects on the reading experience.

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NME lists the 10 worst songs of the 90s.

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Thomas Mallon talks to Weekend Edition about his new novel, WatergateThomas Mallon talks to Weekend Edition about his new novel, Watergate.

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Shearwater visits The Current studio for an interview and live performance.

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Amazon MP3 has 100 digital albums on sale for .

---

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

List of Online “Best Books of 2011″ Lists
List of Online Year-End 2011 Music Lists

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

Paste is streaming Eisley’s new EP Deep Space (out February 14th).

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Financial Times interviews author Nathan Englander .

How would you earn your living if you had to give up writing?

I’d be a psychologist. I’m really interested in people – although at this point I’m more interested in making them up.

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The Chicago Sun-Times is polling readers for the city’s “all-star band” lineup.

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Author Peter Straub talks to FEAR.net about optioning his books for film.

“Being optioned is not the Holy Grail, you know, not really. For a struggling writer, the first and most important goal should be the creation of a good work of fiction, a novel many, many people will want to read and reread, to experience and think about and remember for a long time to come. I mean, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, trying to do anyhow. Screenwriting is a secondary occupation.”

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The Guardian profiles the hip-hop project of Portishead’s Geoff Barrow.

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The Millions compares the U.S. and U.K. covers of The Morning News Tournament of Books contenders.

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Coming in April: a 17-DVD Grateful Dead live box set, All the Years Combine.

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The Chimerist is a Tumblr devoted to iPads written by Maud Newton and Laura Miller.

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World Cafe is streaming a live performance by singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten.

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Portlandia gets a book deal.

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Amazon MP3 has 100 digital albums on sale for .

---

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

List of Online “Best Books of 2011″ Lists
List of Online Year-End 2011 Music Lists

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

The Guardian reviews Chad Harbach’s debut novel The Art of Fielding, and lists three other books that aspired to be “the great American novel.”

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The Los Angeles Times examines the recent success of Sub Pop Records.

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The List of Online Year-End 2011 Music Lists was updated Sunday with 123 year-end music lists added to the master aggregation including BrooklynVegan’s favorite albums and many others.

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The List of Online “Best Books of 2011″ Lists was updated Monday with 81 year-end book lists added to the master aggregation, including Washington Post book critic Ron Charles’ favorite novels and many others.

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The Telegraph looks back on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska album, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.

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Full Stop interviews author Lars Iyer.

Do you place much value on the criticism your work has received? For the past decade we’ve seen a series of cuts to predominant literary magazines and literary supplements, and in response, criticism has moved online. Do you think this move to the non-professional realm has made literary criticism more or less of an isolated cult?

I certainly value the criticism my work has received. The fact that such criticism even exists is impressive to me. Spurious has received many appreciative reviews, including several dozen by readers of all kinds who had to write a short review of the novel in order to vote for it in The Guardian Not the Booker prize. For all that, I must admit, I’d like to see a backlash for Dogma, which is coming out in February. I dream of a detailed take down by Michael Hoffman, as he did for Stefan Zweig a while back, something really cruel … I have a desire to be told off, to be not allowed to get away with it. A desire for the order of the world to be restored, even as I know that it cannot be restored. This, of course, is really the desire for an older literary world, a world of tradition and security from which I feel utterly estranged. It is really a sense of nostalgia and mourning, which is, of course, very much part of Spurious itself. I long for a world in which Spurious itself could not exist, and which would never permit me to posture as a literary author.

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The Observer calls for an end to covers of the Pogues’ “Faiytales of New York.”

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HTMLGIANT interviews Dennis Cooper about his latest novel, The Marbled Swarm.

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Conversational Reading interviews Natasha Wimmer about translating Roberto Bolano’s novel The Third Reich.

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The Chicago Tribune wonders if this is the twilight era of blues music.

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At the Observer, Robert McCrum thinks that craftsmanship and design give hardback books an edge over ebooks.

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PopMatters looks back on twenty years of the Lollapalooza music festival.

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Thomas Frank talks to All Things Considered about his new book, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.

---

Win my three favorite albums of the year and a 0 Threadless gift certificate in this week’s Largehearted Boy contest.

---

Amazon MP3 has 100 digital albums on sale for .

---

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

List of Online “Best Books of 2011″ Lists
List of Online Year-End 2011 Music Lists

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy