Wonderful Things Dept: Better Book Titles
Burrowing from depressing news, I’ve been spending less time on the websites for the New York Times and CNN and the BBC, but not less time on the internet. And, while I’ve found some gems over the past week or so, Better Book Titles towers above the rest.
Events: Gary Shteyngart and Victor Lavalle Read at the 92nd St. Y
Despite spending roughly 80% of my waking hours reading books or writing about them, I don’t attend very many readings — or at least not as many as I should. On Monday evening Reviews Editor Max and I attended a reading by two friends of Full Stop, Gary Shteyngart (FS Interview here) and Victor Lavalle (FS […]
Interview Magazine Finally Gets It Right
While I’m generally a pretty big fan of Interview, their overuse of celebrity-on-celebrity interviews is regularly nauseating. More often than not those interviews — I’m looking at you Marion Cotillard and Nicole Kidman — are nothing but ego massage and fluff. No more. In the magazine’s latest issue, Will Oldham/Bonnie “Prince” Billy/Palace/Mordecai Applebaum and his […]
David Mitchell on The King’s Speech
David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and three other fantastic novels has a piece in Prospect Magazine about Best Picture winner The King’s Speech. While the acclaimed film at best simplifies the historical record and at worst blatantly ignores it — Christopher Hitchens, like him or not, has […]
“How can I possibly ask somebody to read all of this shit that I just made up? It’s asking a huge amount of someone – it’s like asking someone to listen to your dream! It’s a huge imposition.”
Things You Should Do RIGHT NOW: Support WFMU
The great New Jersey freeform radio station WFMU, which has neither corporate sponsorship nor government funding (i.e. NO CREEPS) is having its pledge drive right now. Tom Scharpling, the host of world’s strangest call-in show, The Best Show on WFMU, is one of the funniest people on the planet, and he’s put together his own […]
The Great Gatsby: The Video Game
Turning The Great Gatsby into a 3-D movie? Still a hilariously awful idea. Turning The Great Gatsby into an 8-bit video game? Genius. In The Great Gatsby: The Video Game you play as Nick Carraway and technically look for Gatsby but mostly just go to parties and kill butlers and flappers with your hat. Just […]
If you aren’t checking in with HTMLGiant at least once a day then shame on you: it’s one of the best sources for engaging and hilarious literary commentary on the web. Case in point: Raskolnikov’s Inbox. (via Bookslut)
Full Stop Web Editor (also my bff) Eric Jett and I spent much of our Sophomore year at college reducing a great deal of pre-20th century Romantic and lyric poetry to crass jokes about lovin’ ladies (We wrote WWJD — Women Want John Donne — on our fridge that year and were very pleased with […]
B-Sides and Rarities: Philipp Meyer
The introduction I wrote for my interview with Philipp Meyer is more of a review than a lede. I struggled to make it more conventional and “hooky,” but kept going back to what I had written initially. The finished product, though, was inspired by a paragraph that I cut — when I think something is […]