Clancy Martin

Clancy Martin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. His debut novel How to Sell was published in June last year. He has translated works by Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard and is currently at work on a translation of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, a new novel and a work of non-fiction called Love, Lies and Marriage.

CLANCY CHOOSES SIX WEBSITES

The Nervous Breakdown - Much, much smarter than your usual web literary criticism. Always lively, clever, unpretentious. Shya Scanlon has impeccable taste.

Lary Wallace - Lary is a friend of mine who is now a grad student in Boston, and his brain is like a volcano, he is one of these people who is so smart and so obsessive that you worry he can't last in life. I hope he does. His blog is a take on things culturally current, with "culturally current" being loosely enough defined to include reissues, anniversaries, deaths, and other pegs, any other peg, that will allow Lary to write about what Lary considers interesting. Idiosyncratic and insanely smart.

The Faster Times - I write a column for this site (about love and lies). The writing is consistently fresh and surprising, and three of the minds behind it, Sam Apple, Adam Baer, and Eryn Loeb, are simply first-rate. Lincoln Michel does a fantastic job with the book criticism. Another genuinely stimulating place to read.

The Millions - Well, everybody knows this site, but for good reason. It's just an excellent site for interesting cultural criticism. It gets better and better, and the editors find surprising and fascinating links to material from all over hell's half-acre.

Apartment Therapy - My favorite design site, I think. Very good ideas for people to make their home hip without spending a lot of money. We steal ideas here constantly.

Exotic Pet Co. - While personally I strongly discourage the purchase and trade of exotic animals, I am writing a novel at the moment that revolves, in part, around people who collect exotic animals (and the people who trap, buy, smuggle, and sell them), and this is a classic site for taking a look into that strange world. No list of websites is complete without a really weird one like this, I think.

Read the GWG review of How To Sell by clicking here.

1st June 2010