Once: Best Musical Ever?

Matt’s Movie Minutes for the Month of January
These minutes be a one-time thing, but it’s award season, so here’s my go at making ridiculous comments on films I’ve seen lately.

Once: for fans of Irish indie band The Frames, this is your music music music answer to the talk talk talk of Before Sunrise. Glen [...]

The Quick and The Dead: A Review by Matthew Salesses

This is the fourteenth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project

“Thoughts are infusorial,” says Nurse Daisy, bard of Green Palms nursing home and one of the many characters populating Joy Williams’s sharp-as-the-reaper’s-scythe The Quick [...]

Listening

Greetings from Korea (insert postcard of neon crosses lighting up the Busan skyline here). I’ve been thinking, probably unsurprisingly, about communication. Maybe it’s that I’ve been reading Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead, with its fantastically strange dialogue (review pending), or maybe it’s just the whole idea of two weddings, one Korean and one [...]

The First Page

So these days reading slush for Ploughshares and Redivider, as well as working for Fringe, I’m reading a lot of pour-water-over-my-head-to-wake-myself-back-up, clamp-jumper-cables-to-my-nipples-to-wake-me-back-up, boring-as-rust first pages. Lizzie talked about cover letters a gazillion posts ago; I thought I’d do a sequel. Here’s some thoughts on the first 300 words, because really, an editor can [...]

Lonely?

In the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about a dream where he goes to his own funeral and sees all his friends there, but when he wants to leave with them, he’s told he’s the only one who can’t go to the after-party. (That’s right, in dreams there are always after-parties.) [...]

Flannery O’Connor and Heroes

So this is my first blog attempt and I’m assuming it’s going to suck, but stick with me. Good intro, right? Now I’ll talk about what kind of food got stuck in my teeth this morning (cinnamon apple sauce) and my favorite kind of toilet paper (whatever that commercial is with those red [...]

Native Speaker: A Review by Matt Salesses

This is the fourth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project.
How could you not love the opening to Chang-rae Lee’s PEN/Hemingway award-winning *Native Speaker,* in which narrator Henry Park’s wife, having decided [...]