A Guy on Mad Men: Messing With The Recappers (S6/E8, “The Crash”)

  Sure, Mad Men was bonkers, but did anybody catch Twitter last night? Because while “The Crash” made about as much sense as the useless previews we’re given at the end of every episode, one eye on the television and another on Tweetdeck revealed that the episode had people confused, angry, excited, calling the race card, saying the show had jumped the shark, and I noted more than a few people saying versions of, “I can’t wait to see what the Monday […]

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June 23rd: Real and Critical: Bridging Narrative Nonfiction and Cultural Criticism

We’re very pleased to announce our first Sunday Summer event of 2013 at Community Bookstore: Join us June 23rd at 5pm for the first in a series exploring authors who choose to bring personal narrative into their critical writing. Writers sharing their work include Michelle Orange, author of This Is Run­ning For Your Life, Jacob Silverman, freelance journalist book critic, author of the forthcoming Against Enthusiasm (and three-time Jeopardy champion!), Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects, and Michael Robbins, author of […]

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Jane Austen’s Game Theory

There are always different ways to look at literature, and one great example of that is the new book by economist Michael Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist. “Austen’s understanding of human behavior is strikingly game theoretic,” Chwe says in the video below, turning the beloved author into a proto-game theorist, and also smartly dropping a reference to the Austen-influenced 1995 film masterpiece Clueless.

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Afternoon Bites: Henry Miller Hating On Brooklyn, James Salter, Serious Baby Talk, And More

Just Mark E. Smith talking H.P. Lovecraft. No big deal at all. When Henry Miller hated on Brooklyn before you moved here. “This past year, I found myself in a bittersweet predicament: I was pregnant, but I was uninsured. It is a common paradox for working- and middle-class women: not poor enough to qualify for state-funded health insurance, not rich enough to purchase your own.” – Mira Ptacin on how having a baby has become a luxury at Guernica. Paul […]

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A Guy On Mad Men: Now I Wanna Be Your Don (S6/E7, “Man With A Plan”)

  Sometimes I think it would be interesting to sit down and pull a Michiko Kakutani by reviewing every episode of Mad Men in the voice of some fictional character. If I was to do that with last evening’s episode, “Man With A Plan,” I could only see myself doing it in the voice of Bobby Moynihan’s reoccurring Saturday Night Life character Drunk Uncle, lamenting that Don’s got his Fifty Shades of  Grey…whatever that is, and then singing off key that “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes” are stil taking place in a big way. 

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Father Yod’s Cult of Personality

  There’s been a recent crop of cult fiction books like Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy and Fiona Maazel’s Woke Up Lonely, to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Scientology-influenced movement called “The Cause,” in his 2012 film The Master, that has started popping up. Even though these works undoubtedly deserve your attention, you really can’t beat the real thing, especially when it comes to cults. You get plenty of that with the new documentary The Source Family.

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How Much F. Scott Fitzgerald Can You Take?

I see your future, and in the upcoming days and weeks I see a deluge of posts related to F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby. There will be many more unfortunate top ten lists, photo galleries, and other assorted blog posts to get you attention as the world braces for Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation to hit theaters.

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