Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

“Heavy Rotation” on WNYC radio

Shortly after 1:20pm EDT today (Monday), editor Peter Terzian and contributors Joshua Ferris and Martha Southgate will be talking about Heavy Rotation on WNYC's Leonard Lopate show, airing in New York City on 93.9 FM and AM 820 and streamable anywhere from the show's webpage. (Free download through I-Tunes available here, at least for a while.)

In other Heavy Rotation news, Liz Brown has blogged about the book at Kill Fee, and Peter has written a guest post at Large-hearted Boy about the role music has played in helping him mourn the loss of his mother.

Update, July 13: Newsday published a full-page preview of the book on July 11, and Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review (scroll down) on July 6, writing that "these essays exhibit a perfect blend of respect and irreverence, with
an intoxicating intimacy; readers who love music will devour this
collection, and beg for a second volume."

My review of Matthew B. Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft”

"Nice Work If You Can Get It," my review of Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, appears in this weekend's edition of The National (Abu Dhabi). For the record, I wrote this review well before the controversies of the past week.

Heavy Rotation in Bryant Park

Some photos from New York's Bryant Park today, featuring John Jeremiah Sullivan on the guitar, Nick Laudadio on the drums, James Wood on the bongos, and readings by Peter Terzian, Asali Solomon, Cliff Chase, Stacey D'Erasmo, and Joshua Ferris—all in honor of the release of the music-memoir anthology Heavy Rotation.

Heavy Rotation, more reviews

Some new reviews for Peter's Heavy Rotation:

At Bookforum's website, Nicole Lanctot writes that "it is difficult to put the book down without having been moved—or without jotting down a few albums to listen to."
And at Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Jason Diamond praises Mark Greif's and Ben Kunkel's contributions, among others, and writes that "each entry is an honest embrace of a connection to music."

Review of Alain de Botton’s “Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”

My review of Alain de Botton's Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is in the New York Times Book Review of 28 June 2009. I'm afraid I wasn't crazy about it. As it happens, though, I wrote favorably about de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life in a round-up of Proust news published in Lingua Franca almost exactly a decade ago.