Weekend bites: Letters from John Hughes, continued Pynchon mania, Norman Mailor with his pants down, pop culture and the prez

The late John Hughes had a pen pal. Everybody is weighing in on Inherent Vice, and now, Three Guys One Book gives us a Youtube trailer to add to Pynchon Mania. Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeah’s) did some music for the upcoming Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack. The Rumpus shares some good advice from the late Budd Schulberg. At the New Museum, Norman Mailer is caught with his pants down, sort of, and it’s not pretty. Judy Garland was […]

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Monday Bites: literary duels, giant guinea pigs, poets being selfish, pynchon reviews, daria, david cronenberg picks delillo’s worst book

Good morning! Did you know that Dostoevsky once challenged Turgenev to a duel? I ask, with swords?? Do famous writers still duel? Norman Mailer probably did. And Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez sort of managed, although it was more of a one-punch deal. On literary feuds. Giant guinea pigs trump boy wizards, apparently. The Daily Beast interviews Jeffrey Eugenides, who was fired from his desk job at the Academy of American Poets for writing parts of The Virgin […]

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Norman Mailer Lives On, Someone May Have Walked on the Moon

Taschen is releasing a $1,000 coffee table book called Norman Mailer, Moonfire comprised of Norman Mailer‘s series of articles on the Apollo 11 landing which he wrote in the 60’s and compiled in a book in 1970, Of a Fire On the Moon (now out of print). Mailer fittingly found the whole space travel fever ennui-inducing, a period during which the world’s attention was awed merely by feats of technology while crassly bypassing the philosophical immensities of such an out-of-this-world […]

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Bites: Taschen, Dave Eggers is busy, Egon Spangler, Antony)

Got a thousand bucks to blow? Taschen is putting out their most expensive book in five years, and it’s none other than Norman Mailer’s first posthumous work Norman Mailer, MoonFire: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11. If you want a more creative way to blow a grand, I have this really interesting business project called Vol. 1 Brooklyn that could use some funds. Paper Cuts asks if “Dave Eggers is the busiest man in literature?” We would like to answer […]

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Top five Norman Mailer clips

I’d be hard-pressed to find an event as bizarre as Norman Mailer’s quixotic 1969 mayoral campaign in the annals of New York City political history. Running alongside newspaper writer Jimmy Breslin (who was running for city council president) under the slogan of “no more bullshit“, the Mailer-Breslin ticket sure seems a lot more interesting than the prospect of somebody running against, and getting whooped soundly by Michael Bloomberg. I’d also be hard-pressed to try and find another personality quite like […]

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