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About Reading the City
"Reading the City" is a weekly newsletter of bookish events in and around NYC, a weekly diary of upcoming New York literary life on a need-to-know basis. No long blurbs, no reviews, just book events of all stripes. "Reading the City" links to the author’s books, website, or social pages when possible. Tyler Wetherall, the founder and editor, is a believer in the power of the literary community to raise each other up, champion one another, and help make the site an inclusive and welcoming space for all writers and readers.
Tyler Wetherall is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and teacher, and the author of No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run (St. Martin’s Press) and Amphibian (forthcoming from Virago). She arrived in New York from London in 2014, knowing just three people. She carried with her a manuscript she had written alone in a Victorian outhouse at the end of her mother’s garden in Devon. Her entire experience of the writerly life thus far was solitary—and pretty cold. She found herself in a very special place called the Oracle Club (RIP) in Long Island City, and there she met real life authors for the first time. After staying up late and talking craft, drinking gin, and playing records, or reading poetry and howling into the night, she had found her community, and through that community the practical and intellectual resources she needed to become an author myself.
Photo credit: Sammy Deigh
Elizabeth Howard, Producer and Host of the Short Fuse Podcast
Elizabeth Howard is the producer and host of the Short Fuse Podcast, conversations with artists, writers, musicians, and others whose art reveals our communities through their lens and stirs us to seek change. Her articles related to communication and marketing have appeared in European Communications, Investor Relations, Law Firm Marketing & Profit Report, Communication World, The Strategist, and the New York Law Journal, among others. Her books include Queen Anne’s Lace and Wild Blackberry Pie, (Thornwillow Press, 2011), A Day with Bonefish Joe (David Godine, 2015) and Ned O’Gorman: A Glance Back (Easton Studio Press, 2016). She leads reading groups at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, New York. @elizh24 on Instagram
The Arts Fuse
The Arts Fuse was established in June, 2007 as a curated, independent online arts magazine dedicated to publishing in-depth criticism, along with high quality previews, interviews, and commentaries. The publication’s over 70 freelance critics (many of them with decades of experience) cover dance, film, food, literature, music, television, theater, video games, and visual arts. There is a robust readership for arts coverage that believes that culture matters.
The goal of The Arts Fuse is to treat the arts seriously, to write about them in the same way that other publications cover politics, sports, and business — with professionalism, thoughtfulness, and considerable attitude. The magazine’s motto, from Jonathan Swift, sums up our editorial stance: “Use the point of your pen … not the feather.”
The Arts Fuse has published over 7,000 articles and receives 60,000+ visits a month. This year they are celebrating their 5th birthday, a milestone for a small, independent magazine dedicated to covering the arts.
Why The Arts Fuse? Its birth was a reaction to the declining arts coverage in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. When the number of news pages shrink in the mainstream media, attention is paid. But the continual whittling down of arts coverage has been passed over in silence. Editor-in-Chief Bill Marx started the magazine to preserve the craft of professional arts criticism online, while also looking at new and innovative ways to evolve the cultural conversation and bring together critics, readers, and artists.
Serious criticism, by talking about the strengths, weaknesses, and contributions of the arts, plays an indispensable role in the cultural ecology. Smaller, newer organizations need a response. When they are ignored as they are by the mainstream media, they fail to gain an audience. And without an audience, they fold, further weakening the entire ecosystem.
Assist The Arts Fuse in their mission: to keep arts and culture hale and hearty through dialogue rather than marketing.
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