Podcasts about sven birkerts

Twenty-two of this year's Virtual Memories Show guests tell us about the favorite books they read in 2024 and the books they hope to get to in 2025! Guests include Roland Allen, Shalom Auslander, Laura Beers, Sven Birkerts, Mirana Comstock, Leela Corman, Nicholas Delbanco, Benjamin Dreyer, Eric Drooker, Randy Fertel, Sammy Harkham, Frances Jetter, Ken Krimstein, Jim Moske, Robert Pranzatelli, Jess Ruliffson, Dmitry Samarov, Dash Shaw, David Small, Benjamin Swett, Maurice Vellekoop, and D.W. Young (+ me)! • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

Author & essayist Sven Birkerts returns to the show to celebrate his fantastic new essay collection, The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing (Arrowsmith Press). We talk about the estrangement of the everyday, the problem of other minds, how serendipity tells us something about where we are, authors' photos and self-mythologizing, moving house (& turning 70) during COVID, and the inspiration of Cortazar's Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. We get into the threat of AI to writing, reading, and thinking, opening up to ambivalence, why people find it so tough to say the word "soul", what he misses about teaching, Kierkegaard & Walker Percy's The Moviegoer & being on The Search, and wondering what Bob Dylan is like in the kitchen in the morning. We also discuss writers' homes & graves and the myth of inspiration, his new Sketches From Memory essays and how they've opened him up as a writer, how we build circles of affinity, how his father's career as an architect influenced his eye (but not his writing), why people find it so tough to say the word "soul", and more. Follow Sven on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

Sven Birkerts is the co-editor of AGNI magazine, an essayist, and a literary critic perhaps best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (FSG, 2006), about the impact of the internet and “electronic culture” in general. He's taught at Bennington College, Harvard University, and elsewhere. What is MFA culture, and how has the rise of writing programs in academia changed the course of literature for better and, at times, perhaps for worst? That's this episode's first major topic, with Sven Birkerts offering observations about the rise of braided essays (spurred by Wikipedia perhaps), plus tonal and other stylistic marks that have become common. This episode next features three essays, all with a duality to them. Sarah Khatry's essay, “Afterlives,” has both an objective element to it (she's a data scientist working on Covid-19 data) and a subjective component, too, as she navigates her grandmother's death. Mara Naselli's essay, “My Misogny,” takes on how Pablo Picasso “manhandled” the women who appeared in his paintings, even as Naselli battles with the lessons she's gathered from interacting with her parents. Peter Balakian's essay, “A Poetry Reading in Diyarbakir” is seasoned with lush description of the food to be found in eastern Turkey, juxtaposed with the ethnic hatreds that make life so tough in that region. In every case, Birkerts does an admirable job steering listeners through the material at hand. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Sven Birkerts is the co-editor of AGNI magazine, an essayist, and a literary critic perhaps best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (FSG, 2006), about the impact of the internet and “electronic culture” in general. He's taught at Bennington College, Harvard University, and elsewhere. What is MFA culture, and how has the rise of writing programs in academia changed the course of literature for better and, at times, perhaps for worst? That's this episode's first major topic, with Sven Birkerts offering observations about the rise of braided essays (spurred by Wikipedia perhaps), plus tonal and other stylistic marks that have become common. This episode next features three essays, all with a duality to them. Sarah Khatry's essay, “Afterlives,” has both an objective element to it (she's a data scientist working on Covid-19 data) and a subjective component, too, as she navigates her grandmother's death. Mara Naselli's essay, “My Misogny,” takes on how Pablo Picasso “manhandled” the women who appeared in his paintings, even as Naselli battles with the lessons she's gathered from interacting with her parents. Peter Balakian's essay, “A Poetry Reading in Diyarbakir” is seasoned with lush description of the food to be found in eastern Turkey, juxtaposed with the ethnic hatreds that make life so tough in that region. In every case, Birkerts does an admirable job steering listeners through the material at hand. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

Richard Bausch (“A master of the novel as well as the story ” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times)  previews a chapter of his 13th novel, PLAYHOUSE, scheduled for release by Alfred A. Knopf on February 14, then talks with Alan Rifkin about the book and his craft. Bausch's works have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Narrative, Gentleman's Quarterly. Playboy, The Southern Review, New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize Stories; and they have been widely anthologized, including in The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story. The Modern Library published The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch in March, 1996. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. In 1995 he was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Since Cassill's passing, in 2002, he has been the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard is the 2013 Winner of the REA award for Short Fiction. He is currently a professor at Chapman University in Orange, California. Host Alan Rifkin's novels, essays and short stories of Los Angeles have been published widely. Learn more at www.alanrifkin.com.Intro music is from the song "Slow," performed by Sally Dworsky. Written by Sally Dworsky and Chris Hickey. Available on iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music and all other streaming platforms.Podcast art by Ryan Longnecker.Special thanks to Ben Rifkin.

Our always-on digital world is changing how we read, which means it's altering how our minds work. Literary critic Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age, tells Andrew Harrison how the act of reading is fundamentally different when the printed word is just part of an ever-changing multiplex – and why the state reading puts you in is more important than the words on the page (or the screen).  “A book used to be an escape, but now the outside world is always insistently present.” “It's harder to get inside your own head when there is so much to escape from.”  “Audiobooks are fine but you can't process a literary sentence at the speed of a voice.” https://www.patreon.com/bunkercast Written and presented by Andrew Harrison. Lead Producer: Jacob Jarvis. Producers: Jacob Archbold and Jelena Sofronijevic. Assistant producer: Kasia Tomasiewicz. Audio production by Jade Bailey. Music: Kenny Dickinson. Group editor: Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

FIVE-HUNDRED EPISODES of The Virtual Memories Show?! Let's celebrate this milestone episode with tributes, remembrances, jokes, congrats, non-sequiturs, and a couple of songs (!) from nearly 100 of my past guests, including Maria Alexander, Jonathan Ames, Glen Baxter, Jonathan Baylis, Zoe Beloff, Walter Bernard, Sven Birkerts, Charles Blackstone, RO Blechman, Phlip Boehm, MK Brown, Dan Cafaro, David Carr, Kyle Cassidy, Howard Chaykin, Joe Ciardiello, Gary Clark, John Crowley, Ellen Datlow, Paul Di Filippo, Joan Marans Dim, Liza Donnelly, Bob Eckstein, Scott Edelman, Barbara Epler, Glynnis Fawkes, Aaron Finkelstein, Mary Fleener, Shary Flenniken, Josh Alan Friedman, Kipp Friedman, Michael Gerber, Mort Gerberg, ES Glenn, Sophia Glock, Paul Gravett, Tom Hart, Dean Haspiel, Jennifer Hayden, Glenn Head, Ron Hogan, Kevin Huizenga, Jonathan Hyman, Andrew Jamieson, Ian Kelley, Jonah Kinigstein, Kathe Koja, Ken Krimstein, Anita Kunz, Peter Kuper, Glenn Kurtz, Kate Lacour, Roger Langridge, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, John Leland, David Leopold, Sara Lippmann, David Lloyd, Whitney Matheson, Patrick McDonnell, Dave McKean, Scott Meslow, Barbara Nessim, Jeff Nunokawa, Jim Ottaviani, Celia Paul, Woodrow Phoenix, Darryl Pinckney, Weng Pixin, Eddy Portnoy, Virginia Postrel, Bram Presser, AL Price, Dawn Raffel, Boaz Roth, Hugh Ryan, Dmitry Samarov, Frank Santoro, JJ Sedelmaier, Nadine Sergejeff, Michael Shaw, R Sikoryak, Jen Silverman, Posy Simmonds, Vanessa Sinclair, David Small, Sebastian Smee, Ed Sorel, James Sturm, Mike Tisserand, Tom Tomorrow, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, Kriota Willberg, Warren Woodfin, Jim Woodring, and Claudia Young. Plus, we look at back with segments from the guests we've lost over the years: Anthea Bell, Harold Bloom, Bruce Jay Friedman, Milton Glaser, Clive James, JD McClatchy, DG Myers, Tom Spurgeon, and Ed Ward. Here's to the next 500 shows! • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

When was the last time you read a book cover to cover? And if you are still able to do this, do you feel you read in the same way you did, say, 20 years ago? How is the decline in our collective attention span affecting our ability to read and, by extension, our collective capacity for knowledge, wisdom and art? What do we lose when we lose our ability to focus? This was such a fascinating conversation, with two people who have given this question a great deal of thought.   Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, a teacher, and an advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the newly created Centre for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Previously she was the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of the Centre for Reading and Language Research in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century and most recently of the brilliant Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.   Sven Birkerts defines himself as an essayist, a teacher of writing, and the editor of a literary journal at Boston University called AGNI. He started out as a book reviewer, which led him into becoming a writer of essays and memoirs. In 1994 he wrote ‘The Guthenberg Elegies', which explored the demise of reading and the rise of digital culture. It's a phenomenal book. Then, in 2015, he wrote ‘Changing the Subject', an update on his relationship with digital media, and a powerful cry for the importance of attention and imagination in a time where both appear to be waning.   More recently Sven has become, as he puts it, “kind of obsessed, both in a very literal ‘get and out and do it' way, but also thinking about it, by taking photographs. With his phone. As he puts it, “It has become a little fixation of some sort that has me thinking a lot about how we take in the world and what we keep and what serves us, and what is artistic and what isn't”. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. I interviewed him previously as part of the research for 'From What Is to What If'.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

When was the last time you read a book cover to cover? And if you are still able to do this, do you feel you read in the same way you did, say, 20 years ago? How is the decline in our collective attention span affecting our ability to read and, by extension, our collective capacity for knowledge, wisdom and art? What do we lose when we lose our ability to focus? This was such a fascinating conversation, with two people who have given this question a great deal of thought. Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, a teacher, and an advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the newly created Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Previously she was the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century and most recently of the brilliant Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Sven Birkerts defines himself as an essayist, a teacher of writing, and the editor of a literary journal at Boston University called AGNI. He started out as a book reviewer, which led him into becoming a writer of essays and memoirs. In 1994 he wrote ‘The Guthenberg Elegies’, which explored the demise of reading and the rise of digital culture. It’s a phenomenal book. Then, in 2015, he wrote ‘Changing the Subject’, an update on his relationship with digital media, and a powerful cry for the importance of attention and imagination in a time where both appear to be waning. More recently he has become, as he puts it, “kind of obsessed, both in a very literal ‘get and out and do it’ way, but also thinking about it, by taking photographs. With his phone. As he puts it, “It has become a little fixation of some sort that has me thinking a lot about how we take in the world and what we keep and what serves us, and what is artistic and what isn’t”. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. I interviewed him previously as part of the research for 'From What Is to What If'. This was such a great discussion. I hope you love it. Do let me know what you think. And thanks as always to Ben Addicott for theme music and production.

Paul Holdengräber is joined by Sven Birkerts on episode 181 of The Quarantine Tapes. Sven is a writer and he talks with Paul today about his recent move. He describes his experience of packing and unpacking his library and they discuss the meditation of looking through old books and seeing your own changing tastes and interests.Paul asks Sven about his books,The Gutenberg Elegies and Changing the Subject. They discuss how this past year has increased our reliance on technology and Sven’s discomfort with what the world of algorithms demands from us before turning to his upcoming book on Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and his relationship to serendipity. Sven Birkerts is the author of 11 books of essays and memoir, including The Gutenberg Elegies, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again. His most recent his book is on SPEAK, MEMORY in Ig Publishing's Bookmarked series. Currently the co-editor of the journal AGNI, he was for many years the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He recently moved to Amherst, Ma.

Is it unhip to search for a meaningful pattern in life? Sven Birkerts rejoins the show to talk about his new book, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory: Bookmarked (IG Publishing), which explores time, memory, and those aforementioned meaningful patterns. We get into Sven's history with Nabokov's memoir, his own impulse toward memoir as he approached 50, and the challenge of writing about someone whose prose is as incandescent as Nabokov's. We talk about larger questions of literary greatness, the nature of individuality in an age of distributed social networks, whether Nabokov's best-known book will survive, and what other books and authors have become "unsafe" for undergrad readers. We also gab about packing one's library, finding the perfect notebook, and what the post-pandemic world may look like. Follow Sven on Twitter and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

"At 50, everyone has the face he deserves," said George Orwell, but he died at 47, so what does he know? To celebrate turning 50, I use an obscure Woody Allen movie to talk about why I can't take stock of my life. Then the good part: I ask nearly 40 guests of the podcast one question, "What do you wish you'd done before the pandemic?" (You can skip right to that at 18:45.) Participants include Witold Rybczynski, Kathe Koja, John Holl, Emily Flake, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, Ian Kelley, David Townsend, John Bertagnolli, Jennifer Hayden, Richard Kadrey, Joan Marans Dim, Liniers, Sven Birkerts, Barbara Nessim, David Leopold, Tess Lewis, Ken Krimstein, Michael Shaw, Dmitry Samarov, Maria Alexander, Paul C. Tumey, Kyle Cassidy, Henry Wessells, Warren Woodfin, ES Glenn, Philip Boehm, Woodrow Phoenix, Rian Hughes, Alta L. Price, Derf Backderf, Frank Santoro, Boaz Roth, Carol Tyler, David Mikics, Michael Gerber, Walter Bernard, Whitney Matheson and Dean Haspiel! Follow me on Twitter and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

THERE'S A CROWD ON MY DESK: A word for creative solitude amid the hive life of screens. Mentioned in this episode: John Stuart Mill; Michel de Montaigne; Henry David Thoreau; Neil Postman; Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; Lee Siegel's Against the Machine; Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; John Updike; The Paris Review; Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies; William Shakespeare's King Lear; Zadie Smith; J.D. Salinger; The Chronicle of Higher Education; William Deresiewicz. Music: "Urban Drummers" by Mike Kirin; "Over and Over" by Stanley Gurvich; "Shiver" by Borrtex; "Heavens Anthem" by Skygaze; "Soft Awakening" by John Gegelman; "Belong to You" by Denitia (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist) --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/in-the-atelier/support

This is a reading of Sven Birkets' "Ladder." It is meant for students who need a free audio version to listen to as they read.

From Arlington, MA, essayist and AGNI co-editor Sven Birkerts checks in to let us know what books and poems provide him some degree of solace during the pandemic. We talk about what normal might look like in future and the way the recent past seems unreal, his daily challenge of taking an interesting photo for Instagram, the theme of ongoingness in literature, caring for his 92-year-old mom, and more. Follow Sven on Instagram and Twitter • Listen to our full-length podcast from 2017 • More info at our site • Find all our COVID Check-In episodes • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian ancestry. He is best known for his book 'The Gutenberg Elegies', which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture." More recently he wrote the brilliant 'Changing the Subject'. Both books are utterly brilliant, and I can't recommend them highly enough. As a result, I was so thrilled when I got the opportunity to speak to him... here is our conversation.

Three dozen of the year's Virtual Memories Show guests tell us about the favorite books they read in 2017 and the books they hope to get to in 2018! Guests include Pete Bagge, Kathy Bidus, Sven Birkerts, RO Blechman, Kyle Cassidy, Graham Chaffee, Howard Chaykin, Joe Ciardiello, John Clute, John Crowley, John Cuneo, Ellen Datlow, Samuel R. Delany, Nicholas Delbanco, Barbara Epler, Joyce Farmer, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Paul Gravett, Liz Hand, Vanda Krefft, Michael Meyer, Cullen Murphy, Jeff Nunokawa, Mimi Pond, Eddy Portnoy, Keiler Roberts, Martin Rowson, Matt Ruff, Ben Schwartz, Vanessa Sinclair, Ann Telnaes, Michael Tisserand, Gordon Van Gelder, Shannon Wheeler, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, Matt Wuerker . . . and me! Check out their selections at our site! Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

In the '90s, Sven Birkerts cautioned us about the impact of technology on reading with The Gutenberg Elegies. In 2017, we mute our iPhones to talk about his new book, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (Graywolf Press). We dive into the impact of digital technology on perception and identity, but also get into the way life becomes a thematic puzzle in middle age, why he stepped down from his role directing the low-residency MFA program at Bennington, the joy of bringing his favorite writers in as instructors (and the ones he regrets not getting), the challenge of interviewing fiction writers, his big literary 0-fer and what I'm missing about Virginia Woolf, how he's adapting to a year-long sabbatical and how he understands his writing life, what he's learned editing the literary magazine AGNI, and why the prerequisite for anything he's reading is that it has to be more interesting to me than whatever it is he's vaguely brooding about. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

The author of the gripping new true crime/memoir, THE FACT OF A BODY, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich tells James that "the book teaches you how to write it." They talk about how those lessons evolved over a decade of work, as well as earning the story, engaging with darkness, measuring the emotional impact of working on a memoir versus finishing one, and geeking out over the work of Maggie Nelson. Plus Colin Dickerman, editor at Flatiron Books.   -  http://alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com/ Alexandria and James discuss: Mike Scalise  The Muse and the Marketplace  Celeste Ng  Jung Yun  Emerson College  AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE by Lucy Grealy SHOT IN THE HEART by Mikal Gilmore  FULL BODY BURDEN: GROWING UP IN THE NUCLEAR SHADOW OF ROCKY FLATS by Kristen Iversen  NOW WRITE! NONFICTION by Sherry Ellis  SON OF A GUN: A MEMOIR by Justin St. Germain  DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by Erik Larson  DRIVING MR. ALBERT by Michael Paterniti  The Writer's Room in Boston  Sven Birkerts  THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy  THE HALF-KNOWN WORLD: ON WRITING FICTION by Robert Boswell  BLUETS by Maggie Nelson  JANE: A MURDER by Maggie Nelson  - Flatiron Books: https://us.macmillan.com/publishers/flatiron-books/ Colin and James Discuss: Flatiron Books  The Penguin Press  THE PARIS REVIEW  Joy Williams  Norman Rush  Lydia Davis  Stephen King  A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara  Marc Maron  THE KINGS OF BIG SPRING by Bryan Mealer OLIVER LOVING by Stefan Merill Block  -  http://tkpod.com / tkwithjs@gmail.com / Twitter: @JamesScottTK Instagram: tkwithjs / Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tkwithjs/

Brief Encounters (W.W. Norton)What anthology could unite the work of such distinct writers as Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, Marvin Bell, Sven Birkerts, Meghan Daum, Stuart Dybek, Patricia Hampl, Pico Iyer, Leslie Jamison, Phillip Lopate, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Lawrence Weschler?  What anthology could successfully blend literary forms as varied as memoir, aesthetic critique, political and social commentary, slice-of-life observation, conjecture, fragment, and contemplation?  What anthology could so deeply and steadily plumb the mysteries of human experience in two or three or five page bursts? For the late Judith Kitchen, editor of such seminal anthologies as Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief, "flash" nonfiction—the "short"—was an ideal tool with which to describe and interrogate our fragmented world.  Sharpened to a point, these essays sounded a resonance that owed as much to poetry as to the familiar pleasures of large-scale creative nonfiction.  Now, in Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, Kitchen and her co-editor, Dinah Lenney, present nearly eighty new selections, many of which have never been published before, having been written expressly for this anthology. Taken together, as a curated gallery of impressions and experiences, the essays in Brief Encounters exist in dialogue with each other: arguing, agreeing, contradicting, commiserating, reflecting.  Like Walt Whitman, the anthology is large and contains multitudes.  Certain themes, however, weave their way throughout the whole: the nature of family, the influence of childhood, the centrality of place, and the role of memory.  In Lynne Sharon Schwartz's "The Renaissance," for example, the author remembers her relationship with her mother, tracing her own adolescent route from intimacy to contempt.  In "The Fan," Eduardo Galeano dramatizes the communal devotions of the soccer fan.  And in "There Are Distances Between Us," Roxanne Gay considers the seemingly impossible and illogical demands of love.  What binds these and many other disparate essays together is the ways in which they enrich, color, and shade each other, the manner in which they take on new properties and dimensions when read in conjunction. Dinah Lenney is the author of The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, and, with Judith Kitchen, edited, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction. She serves as core faculty in the Bennington Writing Seminars and the Rainier Writing Workshop, and as the nonfiction editor at Los Angeles Review of Books.Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, and The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller. Her work has appeared in Salon, Slate, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Redbook, O the Oprah Magazine, and other publications. She lives in Palm Springs and teaches in the UCR Palm Desert MFA Program in Writing and the Performing Arts.Chris Daley’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, DUM DUM ZINE, and The Collagist, where “Thoughts on Time After Viewing Christian Marclay's ‘The Clock’” first appeared. She teaches academic writing at the California Institute of Technology and, as Co-Director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles, offers creative nonfiction workshops for students at all levels. Chris has a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction and journalism. Her book of poems include Scattered at Sea (Penguin, 2015), and Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) which was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous twelve books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She was the 2010 guest editor of the yearly anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of California at Irvine.Tod Goldberg is the author of a dozen books, including, most recently, Gangsterland. His nonfiction, criticism, and essays have appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Best American Essays. He lives in Indio, CA where he directs the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside. Jim Krusoe has published five novels and two books of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions. His first novel, Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2002. Since then, Tin House Books has published Girl Factory, Erased, Toward You,and Parsifal. Jim teaches writing at Santa Monica College as well as in Antioch's MFA Creative Writing Program. He has also published five books of poems. His latest novel, The Sleep Garden, is due out this winter from Tin House.

Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian ancestry. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture."

Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian ancestry. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture."

Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press)  Rapid change is part of life in the twenty-first century, and we must all adjust to an evolving world. But for many thousands of creative artists, a torrent of recent changes has made it nearly impossible to earn a living. A persistent economic recession, social shifts, and technological change have combined to put our artists and those whose work supports them—from graphic designers to indie-rock musicians, from architects to booksellers—out of work. As a group, artists, writers, and musicians have never been rich, but for most of American history, Scott Timberg argues, they have been able to build modest middle class lives through diligent work. Today, even artists who are quite successful—musicians with loyal fans and respected albums, award-winning novelists, visual artists with work in museum collections, architects with national reputations—cannot hold onto the benefits of the middle class: stable housing, access to healthcare, and educational opportunities for their kids. Along with artists themselves, the institutions and structures that have traditionally supported them have been decimated. Publishers, booksellers, galleries, record and video stores, radio stations, and newspapers have hemorrhaged jobs in a world of instantly available digital content and music piracy. In addition to a brutal recession and a tidal wave of technology, Timberg examines other drivers of the crisis. Trends in academia have devalued literature, focusing instead on impenetrable theory. An avant garde that disdains “middlebrow” artistic production has led to a shrinking audience for art. Radio monopolies have homogenized the airwaves. The music industry has invested almost all resources in a tiny number of hitmakers. Perhaps most important, entrenched stereotypes of artists as idle dreamers or entitled bohemians, rather than hardworking, highly trained professionals, have made it hard for the broader society to see their vital economic and cultural contribution. Americans respond with more sympathy for job losses in the agrarian economy or in manufacturing than to similarly devastating losses in the creative economy.   Timberg considers both the human costs and the unintended consequences for America if the people who create and support culture cannot stay in the middle class. When only the  independently wealthy can afford to engage in creative pursuits, he warns, culture becomes more narrow, robbed of important and critical perspectives.  When artists and artisans can't make a living, we all pay the price. Full of original reporting and thoughtful analysis, Culture Crash provides a sweeping overview of a very real crisis affecting real workers and their families as well as the broader culture. It is alarming and essential reading for anyone who works in a creative field, knows someone who does, or cares about the work artists produce. Praise for Culture Crash: “Scott Timberg has written an original and important study. He explores some of the most pressing cultural issues affecting the arts and intellectual life with remarkable clarity. This is the first analysis of our current culture from the bottom up—the precarious situation of the individual artists, writers, and musicians who are now struggling to survive.”—Dana Gioia, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts “I read Scott Timberg's pieces every week without fail. It's great to see his book Culture Crash debunk the mumbo jumbo about the long tail, file-sharing, free information, and positive thinking —and take a hard look at what it all means for artists, musicians, critics and teachers.”—Dean Wareham, lead singer of Luna and author of Black Postcards: A Memoir “We've all had the feeling of these enormous changes—long in the making, not ‘at the last minute'—but Scott Timberg has the synthesis that makes them make sense. Culture Crash throws a clear, defining light on the squeeze that digitally-based economies have put on our artists, the analog makers who have always defined us to ourselves. A hugely important book.”—Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age “With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known it.  He mourns the loss of independent book- and record-store clerks who evangelized for quality.  He grieves for artists' ‘day jobs', which allowed creative workers a toehold in the middle-class. Culture Crash is an urgent, necessary book (or eBook) for anyone who has ever been moved by a song, a film, a paragraph or a painting. Without the humanities, Timberg cautions, we may lose our humanity.”—M.G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie and The Accidental Feminist Scott Timberg is a Los Angeles-based culture writer, contributing writer for Salon, and onetime LA Times arts reporter who has contributed to The New York Times, GQ, and The Hollywood Reporter. He is the co-editor, along with Dana Gioia, of the anthology The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he runs ArtsJournal's CultureCrash blog and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son. Janet Fitch is the author of the novels Paint It Black and White Oleander. Her short stories and essays have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Black Clock, Room of One's Own, and Los Angeles Noir, and she is a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.  A film version of Paint It Black has been recently shot in Silverlake and downtown.  She is currently finishing a novel set during the Russian Revolution. Her publisher, Little Brown, owned by Hachette Book Group,  went 14 rounds with marketing giant Amazon last year.

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