ARTĚL Holiday Card 2013

Here's a video I made for Artel glass with an old vintage postcard they found.

Berlin Tech Start-up Scene: Boom or Bubble?

click

I may be writing a song about you. Yes YOU!

It's a contest! To enter you just need to like my music page on facebook or follow me on twitter. A winner will be drawn at random on December 1st. And I will write and record a song just for YOU. http://www.facebook.com/iamkennash
‎https://twitter.com/iamkennash‎

Ken Nash Releases New Album "Human Creatures"

It took a few years to get this baby out the door. During that time I've written enough songs for at least two more albums. Wish I could speed up my production process!

Give the album a listen for free on bandcamp. If you like what you hear, download a copy and share/repost the link wherever you can. There is also a physical CD in hand-made packaging that's available. Order yours now while they're still available.

click here to listen

New Ken Nash CD "Human Creatures" to be released November 2

Some samples of the hand-made CD packaging
Ordering information to come

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equus news

THE TWO LIVES OF EDWARD HOPPER

Posted by Equus Press ⋅ September 28, 2013

The thirty-odd stories in Ken Nash’s collection The Brain Harvest present a variety of styles, themes and arguments. There are elaborate, developed narratives with detailed characters and plots (as in “The Cello Garden,” the fictional account of the life and fate of a beautiful cellist Anna Leibowitz), and there are sketches in a few rough brushstrokes (“Making Babies” and “My Lobotomy,” two very different, yet eerily funny renderings of amorous failures). They feature real-life characters and narrators trapped in surreal or unreal states and situations (e.g. “Maurice Utrillo” who achieves an epiphany of space, surface and depth when observing a commonplace wall); but they also brim with completely fictional or even fantastic characters in equally surreal situations (for example, “Anima Husbandry,” a three-page description of a wife’s dismantling and packing her husband into a suitcase for a trip to Paris). This blending has as its combined effect not only the defamiliarisation of the real, but the equally unsettling familiarisation of the unreal, ultimately posing the question of whether one can or indeed should distinguish between these two in a fictional world such as Nash’s. Equally unsettling is the basso continuo that prevails underneath the episodic brevity and constant shifts in narrative perspective performed by these tales: Nash’s preoccupation with language and the bizarre names inhabiting and describing both the natural and the corporate worlds. To take but two examples, there are the “Cambodian Vine Rattan, Sinai Braided Sea Grass, Singapore Cane, Burmese Celery Hemp, Uyghur Cave Moss” in “Baskets,” or “afternoons watching Korean soap operas dubbed into Cantonese, and evenings watching bootleg videos or playing high-stakes mahjong, while chain smoking Mann Si Fat cigarettes” in “The Hostage.” Nash’s manipulation of the particular and the minute has all the attention for the bizarre and the ability of evoking the grotesque. In terms of analogues and precursors to Nash’s “playful and quick-witted style,” Clare Wigfall’s cover blurb speaks of the “maverick American greats like George Saunders and Donald Barthelme.” To those one can plausibly add Nash’s avowed influence of the labyrinthine structures of Jorge Luis Borges and the evident presence, behind the eerie waft of the everyday turned into the grotesque that hovers over the collection, of Prague’s chief literary revenant, Franz Kafka. Described by the Prague Post as “an eclectic, deceptively witty collection of short fiction that represents the crystallization of one of Prague’s most resourceful and imaginative English-language writers” and commended by Wigfall as a collection whose every short story is “distinct and memorable in its jewel-like compactness,” Brain Harvest is a richly imaginative and  heterogeneous collection.

Read The Two Lives of Edward Hopper here

Yes, you can still order "KEN NASH is stalking me" t-shirts.

 Last orange one already sold.

"The Spinoza of Market Street" and how it brought me to Prague

B O D Y magazine recently published my essay about the great writer Isaac Bashevis Singer's classic short story "The Spinoza of Market Street." This is the first in a series of essays they will be publishing in which writers choose a favorite short story to write about.

Photo by Steve Horowitz

David "Doomsayer" Attenborough Quoted in The Guardian Newspaper

Royal Baby Photo

Can't get enough of the Royal Baby photos. Apparently this is the first "official" photo. Congratulations William and Catherine on your big win!

Poster Design for 27 June Show with Ocean Versus Daughter and Neon Swan

Review of The Brain Harvest in NecessaryFiction.com

"...What this really taught me was the same thing that The Brain Harvest by Ken Nash taught me: precision and compression and crazy hope, how if we zoom in far enough in anyone’s life, the absurdities reveal a depth of honesty and wonder. There’s something amazing in everyone’s life, something historic in everyone’s town."

Read the whole review by Ryan Werner here.

I ❤ Fan Photos!

Keep 'em coming!

Playing in Berlin, May 2013

Back in Gelegenheiten for an evening of music with videos. Should be loads of fun. 18 May, 21.00.

Berlin Vending Machine at U Bahn Station

Condoms and Pregnancy Test Kit (just in case).

Putin on the Ritz

Vladimir Putin. Mmmmmmm...good cracker!

New work: cartoon portraits for headsets.com

Classic Czech 1960s Gibson-style Electro-Acoustic Guitar for Sale

Humbucker pickup

New Tuning Pegs

Includes Gator super protective soft shell case. Contact me for more details. Ken@KenNash.com

Building my papal players collection. Just got my Pope Francis card!

Logo and package design for Wizzy

Yes, I do package design too? Why do you look surprised?

What the Folk? - music evening in Prague

Twoot wit me on twitter and be eligible for a very special prize raffle during the What the Folk? show at Club Napa, Prague.  One random twitter follower will be drawn (Personally, I hope it's you). Winner must be at the show or have your representative there to receive the booty.  

https://twitter.com/iamkennash

What the folk: 

George Saunders confession on NPR

NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan recently confessed to having had no idea who George Saunders was. That seems startling to me. Any occasional reader of the New Yorker magazine will have recognized the name. No?

The New York Times, Slate magazine and others have recently been gushing praise for his latest short story collection, The Tenth of December. Which, to me, is thrilling and scary. Thrilling that his style of short fiction is gaining attention. But scary that it almost seems like he's ripping me off... Okay. Or vice versa. But I'm hoping that those people who haven't already read The Brain Harvest might now be primed for it by having read some George Saunders.