#will wiles

[filthyfragments]

did anybody else read "care of wooden floors" and will let me rant about it please I am struggling so much to get through this

[lucasmaybury]

[theeveryoneindoteveryone-blog]

Will Wiles on British design nostalgia vs the EU

On the Brexit battleground, fluffy design nostalgia is being pitched against the EU. This could all have been avoided, says Will Wiles

“The look of the world, the way it feels and performs, is important.”

[tsuchiman]

“Particularly effective was Calhoun’s name for the point past which the slide into breakdown becomes irretrievable: the 'behavioral sink.' 'The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental,' Calhoun noted drily. The 'sink,' a para-pathology of shared hopelessness, drew in pathological behavior and exacerbated its effects. Once the event horizon of the behavioral sink was passed, the end was certain. Pathological behavior would escalate beyond any possibility of control." “The misery of the rodent universes was not uniform—it had contours, and some did better than others. Calhoun consistently found that those animals better able to handle high numbers of social interactions fared comparatively well. 'High social velocity' mice were the winners in hell. As for the losers, Calhoun found they sometimes became more creative, exhibiting an un-mouse-like drive to innovate. They were forced to, in order to survive.” Will Wiles, The Behavioral Sink

[nendoarticle]

Israel’s design museum will hold a four month retrospective covering the profile output of Japanese studio Nendo and its founder Oki Sato … Israel’s design museum will hold a four-month retrospective covering the prolific...

[fettekatze]

Will Wiles: „Kein Leben ohne Minibar“

Will Wiles: „Kein Leben ohne Minibar“

Ich mag Englische Autoren, insbesondere jene unter ihnen, die über diesen absurden Humor verfügen. Deshalb horchte ich natürlich auf, als Carl’s Books einen mir unbekannten Autoren mit „Feinster britischer Humor mit einer Prise Kafka“ ankündigte. Sofort dachte ich bei dem Klappentext an Robert Rankin, Terry Pratchett oder Douglas Adams und freute mich sehr auf das Buch.

Die Handlung

Neil Double…

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[wbbelcher]

Real Simple's Book Review Panel - Care of Wooden Floors

A couple months ago, on a lark, I became a member of Real Simple magazine's book review panel. Why not? Granted,  I wasn't sure my style and approach fit with Real Simple or its needs, but I thought it would be fun. Anyway, they sent me Will Wiles' Care of Wooden Floors and asked for 300 words, which I dutifully supplied. As was expected, the review - alongside six others - was edited down into a bite-size piece for their website. You can read the mini-review here or by going to Real Simple's website and clicking on the "Work & Life" section. It was a fun little task. Take it for what it's worth.  The book is due out in early October. You can check it out at  IndieBound, talk to your local bookseller, or do your thing online/in the cloud.

For those of you interested, here's the review in full:

Will Wiles’ debut novel Care of Wooden Floors is a portrait of a layabout in crisis. The unnamed narrator travels to a dreary eastern European city to housesit for his best friend Oskar, an accomplished composer and renowned perfectionist. Oskar’s directives regarding the priceless oak floors, the prized piano, and the cats are written in a “prickly, pointy, fussy hand” and deposited throughout the flat. But the instructions are no match for the narrator’s bad luck and poor decision-making. Predictably, under the burden of Oskar’s expectations, the simple task of keeping house goes awry, the plot devolves into farce, and the narrator’s sanity unravels.

Wiles is the deputy editor of Icon, a magazine dedicated to architecture and design. This experience bleeds through the pages of his debut. Great detail is paid to objects and rooms, shapes and styles as well as their inherent or acquired meaning. He effectively positions the apartment as an extension of Oskar’s obsessive personality, but each setting—from the flat to an industrial canal to a strip club—is rendered with the same devotion, and at times, this attention to detail feels overwrought and disconnected from the narrator’s point of view.

Care of Wooden Floors is a well-structured novel, which succeeds in exposing the fissures and flaws in its main characters and exploiting them. In the opening moment, the narrator muses “with all this beauty and isolation there is also an obligation—you must return, you must descend, back to the imperfect.” The narrator proves that perfection is a fool’s game, but perhaps we are all fools, trapped by absurd expectations, spilling wine all over expensive oak floors. Let’s hope we are better prepared for the cleanup than Wiles’ hapless narrator.