Steve Jobs in heaven (on the cover of The New Yorker)

Posted by Jason Diamond In case you haven’t seen it, Steve Jobs teaches Saint Peter how to use an iPad at the gates of heaven on the cover of this week’s New Yorker.  Hopefully St. Pete can read anything off the Apple tablet with the glare of God beaming down on the screen, but what really confuses me is that Steve Jobs was a Buddhist.  Shouldn’t he be depicted as something like a reincarnated bunny rabbit holding an iPod shuffle […]

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Morning Bites: Stacks of books, Jennifer Gilmore talks to Elissa Schappell, Franzen and P.J. O’Rourke on Bill Maher, and more

Slate on the new Jeffrey Eugenides novel, The Marriage Plot.  Vol. 1 on Jeffrey Eugenides: the dude really knows how to rock a vest. If you like pictures of stacks of books from the offices of various media companies, BuzzFeed has got the post for you. Jonathan Franzen, P.J. O’Rourke, and others discussed Occupy Wall Street with Bill Maher this past weekend. Jennifer Gilmore interviews Elissa Schappell over at The Rumpus. Thanks to WFMU for leading us to Hans Richter’s […]

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Morning Bites: Tranströmer takeover, Roth’s consolation prize, Lev Grossman TV, and more

Real talk: Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for literature, and we’ve never read any of his work.  But that doesn’t stop us from thinking the cover for his “20 Poems” is really cool. Philip Roth didn’t win (again…), but he’s been shortlisted for an award celebrating medicine in literature. Steve Jobs gave us our choice of fonts. This whole Lev Grossman book becoming a movie thing is really awesome news. Joshua Cohen says Yizkor (remembrance) for books. Ethan Nosowsky […]

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Morning Bites: Emily Books, lit mag names, Civil War stuffs, Klosterman, and more

Emily Gould’s indie bookstore/bookclub/pretty awesome idea, Emily Books, is up and running. Judging lit mags by their names. The trailer for Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus. CNN talks to Chuck Klosterman. The always great Around the Mall blog continues their reports on exhibits from around the Smithsonian on artifacts from the Civil War.  This time around they tackle The Washington Eight. Who needs Radiohead when you can get Jeff Mangum to play Occupy Wall Street?

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Morning Bites: David Rakoff scores, Marcel the Shell, Fear and Loathing again, and more

Marcel the Shell gets a book deal, and Jezebel talks to Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp about it. “Challenged once by a friend to name a single immortal literary character from postwar fiction — someone to rival Sherlock Holmes or Madame Bovary in terms of bleed-through to popular consciousness — I blurted out “Norman Mailer!” ” – Jonathan Lethem hearts Norman Mailer. David Rakoff wins the Thurber Prize for American Humor for his hilarious essay collection Half Empty. Retracing Hunter […]

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