I agree with one HTMLGIANT commenter: the cover to the Less Than Zero sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, is horrible. Tom Waits to do Shakespeare. I’m just going to call it: the On the Road adaptation will suck. Getting around to reading everything Ralph Ellison is a task Troy Patterson at Slate is not up to. Daniel Nester gives tips for aspiring writers. Michael Schaub reviews Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch at Bookslut. Check out our review of […]
Bites: Is New York Bad for Writers?, Should Bookstores Rethink Shelving?, East of Eden as Performance, the Death of the Man of Letters, How to Get Rid of Hipsters, and more
HTMLGiant asks if New York for writers is The Place to Be, or whether it’s just too damn expensive. Lit. Should bookstores shelve by publisher rather than author? (Thanks, The Rumpus) How East of Eden became a performance piece. A surprisingly interesting picture essay of the last 10 years of Nobel Prize winners in literature. The “slow death of the man of letters”? Hm. Shakespeare’s endless Answers: Why it’s smart to be a Shakespearean fool. Books as art. Very cool. […]
Is Barack Obama the Shakespeare of Politics?
The New York Review of Books has finally printed British writer Zadie Smith’s “Speaking in Tongues,” an essay based on her lecture given at the New York Public Library last December. In character with the 34-year-old novelist, Smith’s lecture is timely and timeless, youthfully sage, and fantastically put together both in terms of syntax and conceptual significance. In her lecture, Smith contrasts Barack Obama’s plight as a politician with William Shakespeare’s easy status as “everyman”: “Shakespeare’s art, the very medium […]