sarah labrie

I’m in an anthology you can buy on Amazon Plus I finished graduate school...

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:41:00 -0400

I’m in an anthology you can buy on Amazon

Plus I finished graduate school today.

Woo.

::dives back into the abyss::

why do you constaly DEFACE ur books

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:51:06 -0400

“If your parents don’t teach you how to live, you...

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:53:40 -0500

“If your parents don’t teach you how to live, you learn it from books; and clever people watch you, to learn from your mistakes.”
- An Experiment in Love, Hillary Mantel

California Prose Directory: Contributor Profile: Sarah LaBrie

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 11:12:33 -0500

California Prose Directory: Contributor Profile: Sarah LaBrie :

california-prose-directory:

Sarah LaBrie is a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University. In our very first Contributor Profile, she talks about the Coast Starlight, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Krysten Ritter, and Walter Benjamin. LaBrie’s story, “In the City of Our Lady the Queen,” which will be…

What did you study in college?

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:05:00 -0500

Comparative Literature. One time my college boyfriend slipped up and called in Competitive Literature, and, for better or worse, that made a lot of sense to me at the time.

INTERVIEWER You’ve said that one of your commitments in writing is strict attention to the...

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 00:37:55 -0500

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said that one of your commitments in writing is strict attention to the individual sentence.

HEMPEL

Yes. Writing conducted at the sentence level has always made perfect sense to me. Allan Gurganus put it very well. He was sitting on a panel on the novel with Stanley Elkin and several others, and there was all this talk about theories of novels and he said, There are those of us who are still loyal at the level of the sentence. That’s the great attraction and motivation. That’s what gets me in, writing or reading. Though it’s unlikely you’ll write something nobody has ever heard of, the way you have a chance to compete is in the way you say it. Now I’ve been writing for almost twenty years, and I still feel the same way. That is how I assemble stories—me and a hundred million other people—at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said you can’t bear to have a bad sentence in front of you.

HEMPEL

Yes. I still can’t. Makes me ill.

-Amy Hempel

Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:44:35 -0400

Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald

My story for the LA Weekly about Argo and Iranian-American actress Sheila Vand

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:23:31 -0400

My story for the LA Weekly about Argo and Iranian-American actress Sheila Vand

Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 21:55:42 -0400

Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

Current reading list includes: Last 250 pages of Kafka on the...

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 21:38:00 -0400

Current reading list includes: Last 250 pages of Kafka on the Shore by Murakami, NW by Zadie Smith, Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg, Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye, Kafka essay and “Task of the Translator” in Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal, This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, Two Novels by Alain Robbe Grillet, Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, Wuthering Heights (in anticipation of seeing the movie), Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, After Nature and Austerlitz by Sebald, last 50 or so pages of The Bathroom by Jean-Phillipe Toussaint.

Leaving the Strand tonight, I set off the alarm. I opened my backpack and when the security guard saw what was in it (the three books I’d binge bought from Barnes and Noble that morning to read and then return, plus four I’d just checked out from the NYU library) he gave me an aggrieved look and waved me through. #YouKnowYouHaveAProblemWhen

“I got slightly bored by the idea that our lives are determined...

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 23:23:58 -0400

“I got slightly bored by the idea that our lives are determined by this search for identity. What about the idea that one doesn’t have an identity? That one doesn’t exist? A lot of people feel that way. Black and white alike, you know?”

—Zadie Smith on NW

OH HEY GUESS WHAT.

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:35:36 -0400

OH HEY GUESS WHAT.

Ending my Internet hiatus to post my grandmother’s review of Beasts of the Southern...

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:30:44 -0400

Ending my Internet hiatus to post my grandmother’s review of Beasts of the Southern Wild:

“well….
on the plus side i feel it was a GREAT effort for an independent filmmaker
on a shoe string budget….and of course I LOVED hushpuppy
(the idea of her own house was just GRAND)

i think i might have appreciated it more if all the leading cast
members had been white. hate to see black folk, yet again,
living in squalor and eating cat food

of course i can appreciate that the Bathtub band was integrated
and the starring roles were black and heroic, not victims (contrast
Precious)

it’s just somewhat difficult for me to place black people in the surreal narrative,
in the magical instead of the real…..once again, its white cinema——its the
way whites would cast blacks. i can’t imagine a black film maker doing
a movie like this. i can imagine that spike lee would have dealt with the
themes in real ways rather than tripping the light fantastic

even though the film is highly artistic and creative, i guess i would have preferred
real black heroes getting things done for real

all in all, an excellent piece of work!”

Are you the hypnosis Sarah Labrie? Because you seem way smarter than her.

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:23:00 -0400

Nope. Not the hypnosis Sarah Labrie. Though I sometimes wish I had her abs.

I wrote about her here, once.

Favorite Thing of Today

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 15:32:57 -0400

In Which You May Be A Lot of Things But You Are Not Alone by Alex Carnevale

(aka: in which you discover you were not the only kid who used to write Ninja Turtles fanfic)

Sigh.

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 06:23:50 -0400

Sigh.

“don’t be sad, just keep going. everyone has an opinion on this earth, but they’ll...

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 22:24:00 -0400

“don’t be sad, just keep going. everyone has an opinion on this earth, but they’ll all be dead someday.”

-Everybody else can go home now. My boyfriend just won all the “cheering up your girlfriend when she’s bummed because writing good fiction is hard” prizes.

Franz Kafka, Diaries 1910-1923

Sat, 05 May 2012 13:24:01 -0400

Franz Kafka, Diaries 1910-1923

So I Finally Watched Girls

Thu, 03 May 2012 02:38:00 -0400

This is the show about twenty-something ladies who sleep with randoms, get pregnant, speak like children, are profligate with money and don’t have jobs, right? And I’m supposed to be upset because nobody on it looks like me? Is that the deal?

“And we had to wear masks…because the book was about masks.” -A friend describing...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 19:21:00 -0400

“And we had to wear masks…because the book was about masks.”

-A friend describing his experience playing one of James Franco body doubles at the launch event for Franco’s latest literary ouevre.