On Sunday, George Lewis Jr., a/k/a TWIN SHADOW, brings his new-wave and R&B-inflected indie-pop to the Paradise, where he'll play songs from his latest record, Confess. Released in July via 4AD, the introspective album has an unconventional companion piece: Lewis's recently penned first novel, The Night of the Silver Sun, which is not yet in print, though excerpts are online. To get a sense of his literary inspirations, we asked the onetime Bostonian, now based in Brooklyn, for a list of reads he recommends. He named favorite classics (Lolita, American Psycho) as well as recent discoveries.THESUBTERRANEANS BY JACK KEROUAC
"A lot of people overlook him and don't take him seriously because they want to lump him in with the whole beat-poetry thing," Lewis says. "He really had nothing to do with that term. He was such an outsider." The Subterraneans is about Kerouac's short-lived romance with an African-American woman. "I really connected with the [discussion] of relationships between people who aren't the same race," he adds. "I think it's a brilliant book."
THE POETRY OF ERIC GREEN
"He is putting together a book of poetry right now, and I've been reading a lot of it," says Lewis of his friend Green, an American poet and artist based in Berlin. "He's an incredible writer, and I just know he's going to come out with something that's going to blow everybody's minds."
LIFE BY KEITH RICHARDS
"Sometimes you don't need a book to be anything more than entertaining," says Lewis. "And [Life] is wildly entertaining. It's fun to hear about other people's stories on the road — and realize how much more fun they had than you are having."
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