With Valentine’s Day rapidly approaching, the more bookish among you may be thinking about getting literary gifts for your loved ones. A swell idea, as far as we’re concerned, but be warned — when given as gifts, books can take on special, often unintended meanings, so choose with care. For instance, as much as we love American Psycho, we’d never gift it to someone we were interested in dating. It just kind of sends the wrong message (like, “I’m imagining your death right now”). So, to save you from any possible missteps, we’ve created a guide to what books not to give to your Valentine, whether you’ve been together for three weeks or three years, and offered our suggestions as to what you might slide across the candlelit table instead. Click through to see what we chose, and good luck.
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Yesterday, Dalkey Archive released a new edition of William Gaddis’ postmodern masterpiece, The Recognitions, the book that Jonathan Franzen called “the ur-text of postwar fiction.” The new edition reminded us of our undying love for postmodern literature — the chaotically playful, the metafictional, and the experimental alike — and inspired us to check out a few books missing from our collection, so we’ve put together an essential postmodern reading list for devotees both old and new. Click through to check out some of our favorite works of postmodern lit — and since of course this is only a starter list, and there are many important postmodern works not listed here (we don’t have unlimited reading time, you know), be sure to let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments.
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Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian era — and possibly some other eras as well. Though Dickens was skilled at creating plot and much loved for his winking sense of humor, perhaps his greatest talent was creating characters, many of whom are still household names a century and a half after their creation. His biographer, John Forster, wrote that Dickens made his “characters real existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe themselves.” Indeed, his characters are extremely rich, and even the most cartoonish of them glow with a certain kind of truth, not to mention some incredible names. To honor Dickens on his 200th birthday, we’ve put together a list of what we consider to be the best of the great author’s many fantastic figures — click through to check out our choices, and do let us know if we’ve missed your favorite (because there are so many other favorites to be had) in the comments!
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A few months ago, we rounded up some of the strangest day jobs of beloved authors had before they were famous — and in the process discovered that William S. Burroughs was once an exterminator in Chicago, William Faulkner served as the postmaster at Ole Miss, and John Steinbeck ran a fish hatchery in Lake Tahoe. Today, we discovered that if Joan Didion had possessed the necessary science credits, she would have preferred to probe the depths of the ocean as opposed to those of the human psyche.
“I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually,” she reveals to Sheila Heti in in the February issue of The Believer. “And when I was out of school and living in New York and working for a magazine, I actually went out to the Scripps Institute, which is now UC San Diego, but then it was just the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, run by the University of California, and I asked them what I would have to do to become an oceanographer. And basically they said I would have to go back to high school, you know. I hadn’t taken any of the science courses that would enable me to take the science courses that I would need to take in order to go to… any place. So I abandoned the idea of being an oceanographer, but I can see myself still as an oceanographer, if I could get to that point.”
So, in case it ever comes up, now you know the one thing that Joan Didion has in common with 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy.
If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: the second eldest (and most fiery) March sister, Jo.
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Today would have been the 98th birthday of legendary author William S. Burroughs, one of the most influential writers not only in the literary realm, but in the cultural landscape at large. Extremely prolific, he wrote 18 novels (or novellas), six short story collections, and four essay collections, and has five published books of correspondence and interviews, as well as appearing in several films and collaborating with musicians. The man had a finger in just about everything, at least culture-wise, and his legacy has lived on in the minds of his still-rabid fans — not only has he been cited as an influence by just about everybody, he gets name dropped left and right, and it seems like almost every band has lifted a song title, album title, or their own name from his prose. To celebrate the birth of the great man, we’ve collected some of Burroughs’s most prominent references in pop culture for your perusal. Click through to explore the web of Burroughs’s influence, and then we suggest taking another look at Naked Lunch, possibly as a Superbowl alternative.
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Like all literary nerds, we’re fascinated by the marginalia of our favorite authors, and recently we’ve been totally addicted to examining their handwritten manuscripts and journal entries. Thanks to the our new favorite Tumblr, Fuck yeah, manuscripts!, there are many examples at hand, but after spending a significant time sifting through, we wondered if we were really learning anything. In an attempt to be pop-psychologists, we checked out a 5-minute online handwriting analysis test (meant, obviously, for hiring managers), to see if we could dig up anything on our favorite writers. We found the results to be something like a horoscope — a little bit right for everybody, but probably kind of random. Click through to check out the handwriting of ten famous writers, and see what it might say about them.
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Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved and much-lauded A Wrinkle in Time turns 50 this year. As The New York Times points out, it’s one of the few science fiction books to have drawn a large female fan base. At the time of its publication, science fiction was not often market to girls, and the genre is still often considered to be mostly the purview of men. Indeed, according to the article, women continue to read science fiction much more rarely than men: “Half of 18- to 24-year-old men say that science fiction is their favorite type of book, compared with only one-fourth of young women… Thirty-two percent of adult male book buyers are science-fiction fans compared with only 12 percent of women.” However, lots of girls and women love science fiction, and we are confident that many more could, if only they gave it a chance. To help with the gender imbalance in this delightful, political, strange genre of speculative fiction, we’ve put together a list of 10 great science fiction books for girls and women — though we think anyone would enjoy them. Click through to check out our picks, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your own favorites in the comments!
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As fans of Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho likely know, the best-selling author has been a longtime supporter of the illegal downloading of his work. Now, he’s joining forces with The Pirate Bay, calling himself “The Pirate Coelho,” and asking readers to download everything that he has ever written from the file-sharing site. But don’t assume his motives are altruistic.
“The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD,” Coelho has explained. “It’s the same with literature. The more people ‘pirate’ a book, the better. If they like the beginning, they’ll buy the whole book the next day, because there’s nothing more tiring than reading long screeds of text on a computer screen.”
What do you make of his logic? Do you think he’d feel differently about giving his work away for free if he hadn’t already sold more than 100 million copies of his books worldwide? [via The Guardian]
Today marks the 130th birthday of James Joyce, one of the most lauded and influential writers of the 20th century. Joyce is one of those guilt-producing authors — you know you’re supposed to have read at least one of his important works, but things — life, contemporary novelists, the difficulty of his prose — keep getting in the way. So you put it off, and whenever his name comes up you must either admit you’ve never read him or just nod along with a glazed look in your eye and hope no one questions you. We understand how you feel, and to help you out on a day sure to be filled with Joyce-centric coffee shop conversations (we imagine), we’ve put together a handy guide to pretending you’ve read the author’s major works. After all, who ever said Cliffs Notes were just for college students? Click through to get schooled, and prepare to dazzle at your next literary event.
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