Bites: Banned Books Week, Rumpus on Tao Lin, Moby-dick on TV, Mamet’s Anne Frank dismissed, Obama’s intelligence, Iran’s fears, and Sarah Palin’s book

It’s Banned Books Week.  Whether the tradition is pointless, harmful or trivial, READ.  You’ve got a lot to choose from. Lit. Gene Hackman has retired from acting to write historical novels. The Rumpus interviews lit-man Tao Lin Maps of sin created by plotting per-capita stats on “things like theft (envy) and STDs (lust).” (Thanks, The Rumpus, yet again) A $25.5 million telepic of……Moby-Dick! TV movies of romantic, winding literature are my pornography.  (Not in that gross way, though.  Ew.) George […]

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Bites: The last days of a punk poet, King Dork banned?, the Dickens Question, Chicago Olympics, Park Slope protest, more

The New York Times on the last days of Jim Carroll. Lit. Frank Portman’s King Dork: future banned book? Every now and then, we just have to re-bring up the question “Why are we still reading Dickens?” (The Rumpus reminded us that The Guardian reminded us a few weeks ago.)  Answer: good characters, good stories, social, historical, amusing, etc….  I’m glad we keep ending at the same conclusion. Famous novelists spies.  Very cool.  Tolkien, Greene, Maugham, Fleming… The Millions on […]

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Bites: 9/11 novels, Nick Cave’s new book, Sufjan Stevens clip, Fashion and Tennis, the mind of Joe Wilson, and more

  Lit The Daily Beast’s Sam Jacobs lists the 9/11 novels actually worth reading. “Welcoming Remarks Made at a Literary Reading, 9/25/01” at McSweeney’s Nick Cave (pictured above) talks about The Death of Bunny Munro (Thanks, Guardian) Michelle Huneven (Blame) picks songs for Largehearted Boy. The sentence “Dan Brown, is expected to pull a J.K. Rowling by single-handedly hauling the publishing industry out of the toilet” sends chills up my spine. (Thanks, January Magazine) Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” once […]

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