Unbridled Books

Django Reinhardt was a prodigy at thirteen playing the cafés of Paris. A burn victim at eighteen when he came home from a gig and knocked over a candle in the caravan where he lived with his young wife. The materials for the celluloid-and-paper flowers she made to supplement their income were highly flammable, and the caravan flashed quickly into flame. A small miracle at twenty, when he emerged from a long convalescence after the fire that ruined half his left hand and revealed an improbable new technique: he worked the frets with two fingers and made his own substitutions for the standard major and minor chords. The miracle was that he played better after the fire than before. He carried the fire with him through all the days of his life, in his two curled fingers and in the way he used a match to hold the bridge of his battered guitar up to the proper height.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

Step inside and it was just another bar, all chatter and shadows and the faint smell of stale beer, but at the back of the room was a window, a red paper umbrella attached to a wall, a doorway covered by a velvet curtain. The window was almost soundproof. From the dark of the bar he would stand and look through into a brighter world, a small dim room with a lit-up sign that read Hotel d’Orsay and a few rows of people sitting on uncomfortable chairs. Under the Hotel d’Orsay sign musicians set up their instruments, plugged in their amplifiers, milled about drinking beer while the audience stared at them, tested the mikes at their leisure, eventually got around to settling down behind their instruments, and then played some of the best music Gavin had ever heard.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

There was an afternoon spent staggering through swamps under a wide-brimmed hat, listening to a park ranger named William Chandler talk about the new monsters that had been appearing since the early ’90s. The creatures in the Florida swamps were terrifying and new, and the canals delivered the swamps to the suburbs. Experts speculated that some of the animals had been blown deep into the swamps by Hurricane Andrew—greenhouses that had held snakes had been found shattered and empty once the storm had passed—but most were abandoned pets. Small glittering lizards who’d seemed manageable enough when they were babies but then outgrew aquarium after aquarium until they’d become seven-foot-long two-hundred-pound Nile monitors with eerily intelligent eyes and extravagantly pebbled skin, perfectly capable of eating a small dog.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

Listening to Undraland by Valdimar (streaming free at GogoYoko) →

1. Sometimes music is needed.

2. Sometimes silence.

3. This is probably because a novel is a piece of music, like all written things, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it.

4. Sometimes I have written them on subways, missing stops, like people do when reading.

— Beautiful stuff from Alexander Chee’s blog.