The Grant Catton Blog

This is probably not a book I would've gotten hip to on my own, for whatever reason; however, a friend recommended it earlier this summer. I've since found out it's sort of the "it" book of the summer, the beach read everyone is talking about or has at least heard about. And by everyone, I mean women I know who read fiction. I have yet to meet a male who has read this book or intends to read it. But that has nothing to do with the words on the page, and I digress... Where the Crawdads Sing  takes place on the coast of rural North Carolina and spans about 15 years from the mid-50s to 1970, mostly centering on the life of main character Kya Clark, aka "The Marsh Girl." Starting from when her mother leaves the family, in her early childhood, Kya's family one-by-one abandons her until she's left alone, at age 10, to raise herself in the family's shack by an isolated and remote section of marsh. Through the years, Kya has interactions with loc

Review of a short story from the Aug. 5 & 12, 2019 issue of The New Yorker... It's interesting to read a short story -- with zero context going in -- and then find out the author is an enormous success and the story's main character has an entire HBO Mini-series based on her. Apparently, Elizabeth Strout is the author of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge , and many subsequent books afterward featuring the novel's eponymous main character. The latest of which is Olive, Again , a collection of stories to be released this fall and featuring (you guessed it) the story "Motherless Child."    I get a little pissy when authors of this gargantuan level are featured in The New Yorker with fairly mundane short stories which are only meant (clearly meant) to act as advance PR for their forthcoming bizillionth book. I get it. This is the way the publishing industry and the media game work. But I don't have to necessarily like it. I wou

So this is going to be more of a recommendation than a review, but whatever. Listen to this album. In fact, if you have any taste for synth-pop or electro-pop at all, you should definitely get into Cut Copy. This Australia-based band has been putting out albums for about 10 years now. I caught onto them in 2011-ish, saw them live twice, even  interviewed the band's creator - Dan Whitford - for NUVO Magazine back in Indy during the time when they were on their Zonoscope tour. Zonoscope is another awesome album which you'll get to if you discover you have any affinity for Cut Copy. Anyway, I lost track of Cut Copy after their 2013 album Free Your Mind , mostly because they didn't have much output after that other than a couple remix tapes and compilations. Recently, however, I was searching around for new music on Spotify and I decided to see what they'd been up to. That's when I found Haiku From Zero , and I will forever be grateful to Cut Copy for deliverin