Daily Quotable: The Books of Wes Anderson

“I wrote the text and described the covers in the script. We actually hired a different artist to design the cover of each book. I worked with them to do it, but that was different people’s artwork so that’s why they each kind of had their own voices as illustrations. We also animated [the books], and I think you can see it on YouTube. The books that Suzy doesn’t read from in the movie, I wrote a little paragraph of […]

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Morning Bites: Feedback Press, Vonnegut Novella, Amelia Gray On Water, Hunger Games, And More

Have you checked out Feedback Press?  Obviously we’re excited because our own Tobias Carroll is involved (figured that needed to be mentioned), but chapbooks by Maura Johnston, Mike McGonigal, and other great people is something we’d mention anyway. An unreleased Kurt Vonnegut novella from the late 1940s will be released today. Amelia Gray on the water in Los Angeles at GOOD. Hunger Games fever is upon us. We should probably mention the Wes Anderson commercial. Ancient Egypt making a comeback […]

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Whit Stillman In Bronxville

I love Wes Anderson as much as the next person whose college years took place during or right around 9/11, but that didn’t stop me from getting drunk one night and spouting off a bunch of crap about how Whit Stillman is Wes Anderson — for adults!  Whether this is true or not I will leave up to you, but Stillman’s trilogy of films dedicated to the “Urban Haute Bourgeoisie” rank among my favorites, and I am willing to bet that Damsels in Distress, […]

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Bites: Best Book Covers, “Bush-League Method acting,” Social Thuggery, and More

Enough with the literary-merit top 10 lists.  Here are the best book covers of 2009.  I personally love the look of Ruben Toledo’s designs, but not at all for the books they represent.  An awkward confluence of visionary tones.  Who imagines their literary heroines with such artistic flair?  It’s unsettling. Lit. & Academia City University of New York dean Ann Kirschner recently read Little Dorrit four different ways (paperback, Kindle, iPhone, audiobook).  This week, she talks about it on NPR. […]

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Bites: Juliet Linderman Interviews Paul Auster, LOOK on Display, Wes Anderson’s Music Choices, and more

Juliet Linderman, managing editor of The Greenpoint Gazette and featured reader at last month’s Vol. 1 Storytelling anniversary party, has lovingly and skillfully interviewed Paul Auster for The Rumpus. It is “lovingly” done in the sense that she clearly holds the novelist to eminent, celebratory respect, and “skillful” in that she just did it really fucking well. And Auster upholds it with his writerly charm, eclipsing the recent unpleasing flavor left atop my literary taste buds by Cormac McCarthy.

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Bites: A Woman’s Wit, James Franco is on Daytime TV, So What?, Aerosmith Understands the Internet, and more

The New York Times reviews “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen in Life and Legacy” on exhibit at The Morgan Library & Museum. Lit. Even though there are approximately one billion newly published food memoirs per American second, everyone’s still obsessing over Jonathan Safran Foer and his book about that ultra-modern idea of vegetarianism. Wells Tower is also still writing for Outside Mag. According to the Rumpus, this is one example of why fiction writers make good journalists. The Guardian reviews […]

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Bites: Chabon Interviewed, Granta Changes, Literary Doppelgangers, Grand Theft Auto & Inherent Similarities, Anderson to adapt Dahl, Real Chocolate, and more

Michael Chabon is interviewed at Jacket Copy on fatherhood and the writing process: “I think in a way, that’s sort of what you’re engaged in doing as a writer, too. You come into this inheritance of things that have been done and the ways in which they have been done, and people who influence you sort of pass along what they think is important, and what they think you need to know how to do. But over time you begin […]

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