KR Blog (Free subscription) | 26/11/2009
A month ago I wrote a post on re-reading (and also re-listening). The premise was simple: books and records stay the same, while we — the readers, the listeners — change. But then something happened: I spent a week teaching David Foster Wallace — something I do most years, but hadn’t done since his suicide [...]
The Art of Fiction (Free subscription) | 25/11/2009
Writing in the Guardian Zadie Smith speaks of her own novel-nausea, a recognisable imaginative writers block, in response to a polemic that has just come out in America asking that novels should be more full of the "real" and less of the made-up. A novelist who has been having a sabbatical reading other peoples' novels, and writing essays about them, Smith, as so often in her non-fiction...
The Millions (A Blog About Books) (Free subscription) | 23/11/2009
The Howling Fantods live-blogged last week’s DFW conference at CUNY.
A Work in Progress (Free subscription) | 20/11/2009
It's really too soon to be thinking about reading plans for next year, but I find myself doing so anyway. Mostly I want to have very few plans and just see where my reading takes me, but there are a...
Open Source (Free subscription) | 19/11/2009
Mary Karr, the poet and ever the “scrappy little beast,” gives me three more reasons to marvel, and cherish her, in her third memoir. Lit, after The Liars’ Club and Cherry, is the story of drinking her way to Catholicism, sobriety and more writing. Her title refers, she says, to the things that [...]
IvyGate (Free subscription) | 18/11/2009
It should come as no surprise to our faithful (and always charming) readers that we’ve been a bit scarce lately. Turns out that IvyGate is a great way to get a great job that takes a great amount of time and effort to do. That’s where a few of us have been lately. So here’s an [...]
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 18/11/2009
The current Tin House has fiction by David Foster Wallace: "THE PLANET TRILLAPHON AS IT STANDS IN RELATION TO THE BAD THING." Not sure what this is.
Bostonist (Free subscription) | 16/11/2009
Photo by Clayton Hauck Chicagoist occupied itself with Twilight and pillow fights . Seattlest reminded us that we don't watch Mariners baseball for the game, we watch it for the player-on-player bromance . Phillyist got personal this week, calling the man who stole a staffer's purse their official asshole of the week . Torontoist thought about personal blogging , with special guest Lauren White (known...
Austinist (Free subscription) | 13/11/2009
John Krasinski directs Julianne Nicholson in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Almost completely unadaptable for the silver screen, David Foster Wallace's work has been something that most screenwriters wouldn't dare touch, what with the monolithic footnotes and the complicated structure of his prose. This precedent, however, was not enough to deter a young John Krasinski (who you may know as Jim...
Bluestalking Reader (Free subscription) | 13/11/2009
I thought I hated Chuck Palahniuk. Ever since I saw my first book by him a few years ago. I judged him without even reading him, going solely on the covers of his books and something or other I read...
Blog Town, PDX (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
The popularity of Cute Overload (and the more than 150 other cute-animal sites catalogued by the recommendation engine StumbleUpon, including Stuff on My Cat, Cute Things Falling Asleep, Kittenwar, and I Can Has Cheezburger) reflects a growing self-infantilization that is also in evidence at the social-networking site Facebook, where countless subscribers have posted photos of themselves as babies...
The Huffington Post (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
A while back, as a nice gesture, a publishing pal gave me George Saunders' (at the time) new book, The Braindead Megaphone. Exciting: here in...
BookPeople's Blog (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
ohn Krasinski (better known as Jim Halpert on THE OFFICE) will be in Austin this weekend to promote his new movie and directorial debut, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The movie is based on the book of short stories by influential and recently deceased author David Foster Wallace.
The Waterglass (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
The following is a review of Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace published in 1996 and clocking in at 1,079 pages. It took me two months to read it. Do I recommend it? There’s a big caveat to reading this book that I feel people should know, but I save it for my [...]
Flavorwire (Free subscription) | 10/11/2009
The wait for Nabokov’s unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, is almost over (countdown to November 17th, people). The story, if you hadn’t heard, is that before his death the grand master ordered his son, Dmitri, to destroy the notecards on which he had been crafting his newest novel. Dmitri, after much struggle (both in [...] Related posts: The New Yorker ’s More than 10,000 on...
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