At The New York Times: Peruvian Nobel laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, discusses teaching Borges at an Ivy, investing his money, and the killer commute from Jersey to Manhattan: ““It’s very nice. But not if you take the train at 5 or 6 o’clock. It can be a Kafkaesque commute.” At Vice: Blake Butler and NY Tyrant take HTML GIANT’S “Mean Week” on the road, and trash Jonathan Franzen over at Vice. Hilarity ensues. At Boing Boing: Star Trak characters reading […]
Weekend Bites: Cusack as Poe, White Writers From NY, Smart Cities, Glenn Beck/Lady Gaga, and More
At A.V. Club: After years of playing the same sad sack misanthrope we’ve all come to know and love, John Cusack will play Edgar Allan Poe. At Harpers: The most expensive BBQ ever. At Jacket Copy: 12 literary oddities available on Ebay. At Impose: Julia Holmes tells us what she’s read recently. At The Faster Times: Lincoln Michel weighs in on the NY Times love of white dudes issue. At HTMLGIANT: Jimmy Chen is on a roll. First it was […]
Weekend Bites: Kubrick’s Napoleon, Book Reviews as Christmas Catalogs, Poe’s Letters Fetch Mad Cash, The Sport of Kinks, and More
The story behind Stanley Kubrick’s never made epic, Napoleon is now in $700 dollar book form thanks to Taschen. New York Magazine wrote about it Human Resources is a bit apprehensive about anybody else attempting a film about the tiny French leader. Lit. Dear New York Times Book Review, Levi Asher thinks you look “like a Christmas catalog“. If you have a book called Sex Dungeon for Sale, the only natural thing to do to celebrate it’s coming out is […]
Conversation: Literary Pets Guy, Chet Phillips.
Chet Phillips had me at his illustration of John Pupdike, but then I started looking around his Etsy store, and figured that it seemed necessary to bother him about his art. What do you like more, domesticated animals or books? A book about domesticated animals with a literary theme, illustrated by me would contain just about the right blend of likeability . Whats your favorite animal? Hands down, monkeys. This fascination can be directly linked with the fact that I […]
Bites: Poe and Balloon Boy, Roth Interviewed, Fitzgerald’s taxes, Kim Gordon’s art, and more
Did you ever think there was a Balloon Boy and Edgar Allan Poe link? Did you care? Philip Roth gives an interview over on The Daily Beast. Holy shite. Apparently hipsters hate trivia night, but we proved that nerds don’t, and the good folks as L Magazine filmed it. Lit. The Mexican government kept an eye on Gabriel García Márquez, thinking he was a Colombian spy. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s taxes. I’m interested. How to survive as a writer in the […]
Bites: Stephen Elliott in Williamsburg, McSweeney’s Broadsheet, the Original Gossip Girl, Lethem Recommends Poe, Balloon boy FAQ, and more
Stephen Elliott hung out in Williamsburg (went hard, if you will) and wrote about it on The Rumpus. Lit. Largehearted Boy reviews Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked. McSweeney’s to publish an old-fashioned, Sunday edition-sized broadsheet: San Francisco Panorama Jonathan Lethem recommends on Daily Beast Edgar Allen Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and describes it as “the missing link between Mary Shelley and Herman Melville.” My kind of narrative. On Willa Cather’s development as a novelist. […]
Bites: Fiction v. Non-Fiction, Poe’s Funeral, Proust’s Questions, Lev Grossman on being a critic, Wild Things, Hornby’s Education, Nick Cave & PJ Harvey, and more
Jim Shepard for Electric Literature on the subject of fiction based on non-fiction: “We need to bear in mind, as we’ve been told many times, that we’re working from, but not necessarily about, our lives.” Lit. Edgar Allen Poe gets a real funeral. (Thanks, The Rumpus) On Vanity Fair’s website, take Proust’s Questionnaire and find out which celebrities you most resemble. Lev Grossman guest-posts for and on the National Book Critics Circle blog. Film, a Quick Weekend Roundup What will […]
Bites: Libba Bray steals our hearts with a song, Poe’s dead date, Obama’s book, Brooklyn cliches, and more
Breaking! Libba Bray picks “Roadrunner” by The Modern Lovers as one of her songs in her turn at Largehearted Boy’s “Book Notes”. This makes us like her even more. Lit. Last night saw Thurston Moore reading Naked Lunch to a packed house at St. Marks Church. Next we find the Sonic Youth leader starting a publishing company. The Desk Set talk about rare book librarians. Yesterday was the 160th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s death. We failed by not […]