Archive for March, 2011

Greg Lindsay is a journalist whose writing has appeared in publications like Time, Fast Company, and recently the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. His new book Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next (co-written with John D. Kasarda) is a fascinating look at the future of cities in an increasingly connected world. To mark its publication this month, Lindsay hopped on Skype with Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, to talk about Aerotropolis, global urbanism, the role of the architect, and the internet’s place in architectural criticism today. Work in Progress is bringing you the second part of this conversation; you can head over to BLDGBLOG to read the first part.

Geoff Manaugh is the founder and author of BLDGBLOG, one of the best architecture and design blogs out there today. He is a former senior editor of Dwell magazine, a contributing editor at Wired UK, and the author of The BLDGBLOG Book, one of Amazon’s 100 Best of 2009. (more…)

Rahul Bhattacharya, who lives in New Delhi, is the author of Pundits from Pakistan, a book of reportage, and The Sly Company of People Who Care, a first novel to be published by FSG in May. He answers some questions about the desire to escape home, the visceral energy of Creole, and V.S Naipaul.

-Eric Chinski, Editor in Chief

Chinski: Your first book was a work of reportage on the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry. Why did you decide to turn next to writing your first novel?

Rahul Bhattacharya: I didn’t, actually. The form came afterward, at the moment of writing. What I was responding to was the impulse to get away. It’s a terribly seductive impulse: What are the consequences? In part I was getting away from writing about cricket as well. But I’m grateful to cricket-writing, without which I may not ever have had a chance to visit the Caribbean.

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In 1949 Theodor Adorno famously said that “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” How, Adorno seemed to be asking, could existing forms of artistic representation be expected to convey something so aberrant, so distant from normal human behavior? Adorno’s comment thus represents a challenge to artists who seek to present the horror of the Holocaust in general and of Auschwitz in particular: to do so, they must move beyond traditional modes of representation and create new structures and forms. (more…)

We’ve partnered with the good folks at BOMB Magazine to offer our subscribers an exclusive sneak peak of Roberto Bolaño’s poetry collection, Tres (New Directions), excerpted in their upcoming spring issue. To read Poem #31, please subscribe. This will be online for only a short time, and BOMB #115 will be on newsstands later this month.

-Ryan Chapman