Morning Bites: Emily St. John Mandel, Fox Mole Gets a Deal, Bret Easton Ellis and Your Novel, and More

Benjamin Samuel of Electric Literature talks to Jacket Copy about Recommended Reading. Roxane Gay tackles Girls at The Rumpus. Also, Roxane Gay has just made all other think pieces on Girls totally irrelevant. Book Riot talks to Emily St. John Mandel. Bret Easton Ellis will review your novel for $5,000. Who doesn’t love fictional rich people of the 1980s?  (It seemed fitting to post this after something about Bret Easton Ellis.) The Fox Mole got a really sweet book deal. Follow Vol. […]

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The Greatest Books I’ve Never Read, Part 3: Bret Easton Ellis’ “Less Than Zero”

In each volume of his bound-to-be-award-winning series “The Greatest Books I’ve Never Read”, avid procrastinator Nick Curley profiles a renowned tome of fiction that, for a variety of reasons, he has not gotten around to completing during his tenure on this earth. In other words: an almost entirely uninformed book review. This series aims to be confessional, cathartic, and as embarrassing as possible. It is an inquiry into non-reading where reading should have been: a descent into the illiterate soul. Join […]

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Morning Bites: Marc Maron Meets Bret Easton Ellis (On Twitter), Saul Bass For Kids, Abbey Talk, And More

That tweet by Marc Maron to Bret Easton Ellis is a perfect example of why it is perfectly alright to stay on Twitter past midnight.  We are also hopeful that this is Maron’s invite to Ellis to appear on his WTF podcast. Meredith Blake at The Paris Review meets Lady Fiona Herbert, the eighth Countess of Carnarvon, and talks about her book Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey. Rob Horning at The New Inquiry on Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. A Wisława Szymborska […]

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Indexing: Jet-lag literature, Nabokov, The Believer, Edith Wharton, and more

Tobias Carroll And lo: there was the literature of jet-lag. The second time around, the strengths of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition remained intact: haunted characters and a pinpoint command of culture. Its flaws — notably, a conclusion that effectively sidelines the novel’s protagonist — remained present. And still, Pattern Recognition may well be my favorite of Gibson’s books: a morally resonant, deeply contemporary thriller that hits nearly all of my sweet spots. (Mysterious films, subcultural intrigue, globetrotting.) Were I fond of […]

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Morning Bites: Ford’s Grapes, Easton Ellis on Charlie Sheen, Pizza Island, The Ex, and More

When John Ford met John Steinbeck: The New Republic looks at the film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath. It’s great when Flavorwire dorks out and does something like the A-Z of Typographic Book Covers. At first you think to yourself that it’s a pathetic grab at bettering their SEO value, but then you realize the article, “Charlie Sheen is Winning,” was written by Bret Easton Ellis A bunch of women, hanging out and drawing at a place called Pizza […]

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