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Announcing Flavorwire’s First Short Fiction Contest

By Judy Berman on

Flavorwire is thrilled to announce its first-ever short fiction contest. In honor of May’s National Short Story Month, we’re offering a prize of $500 for one outstanding short story. To enter, simply send a story of 5,000 words or less — in the body of a message, not as an attachment — along with a brief author bio and all relevant contact information to flavorwirefiction@gmail.com by Friday, May 17. Flavorwire Literary Editor Emily Temple will judge all entries and announce the results on the 24th. We’ll publish the winning story, along with a handful of honorable mentions, on Flavorwire throughout the final week of May. … Read More

Books

Publishers’ Craziest Schemes to Avoid Book Spoilers

By Tom Hawking on

The news that the translators of Dan Brown’s new book Inferno were basically isolated from the world for two months to avoid any chance of them leaking its plot was enough to elicit a collective bewildered shaking of the head at Flavorwire central. Still, it’s not even the batshit craziest thing that publishers have done over the years to avoid details of their precious books leaking before publication — as an industry, publishing has embraced the embargo-based insistence on secrecy so beloved of Hollywood, especially when it comes to books likely to sell in the bazillions (i.e., anything by JK Rowling). Here are some of the craziest schemes concocted to avoid leaks. … Read More

Books

‘Adulting’ Author Kelly Williams Brown’s Open Letters to the Girls of ‘Girls’ on How to Grow Up

By Emily Temple on

This week, the hilarious Kelly Williams Brown of Adulting publishes her first book, Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps, a witty and wise instruction manual for getting it together at — let’s not lie — pretty much any age. To put her skills to the test, we asked Brown to give a little advice to the women in our lives that are most in need of it — the characters of Girls, of course. After the jump, find Brown’s open letters (she’s careful to note, “These letters would be unspeakably rude, if these people weren’t, um, fictional”) to Hannah, Marnie, Shoshanna, and Jessa. … Read More

Architecture

20 American Mansions Fit for Jay Gatsby

By Tyler Coates on

While The Great Gatsby is filled to the brim with powerful symbolism, houses play a particularly important role in defining F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters. Gatsby himself built a gigantic mansion at West Egg that purposefully looked classical, giving the illusion of long-standing prominence. Fitzgerald based Gatsby’s mansions on many real-life homes (including the now-demolished Beacon Towers and Land’s End, which both stood on Long Island’s Gold Coast), but there are a handful of castle-like mansions on the Eastern Seaboard that would be perfect for a number of lavish, Gatsby-style… Read More

Books

What It’s Like to Read ‘The Great Gatsby’ for the First Time at 37

By Jason Bailey on

With Baz Luhrmann’s splashy adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel contender hitting theaters Friday, Flavorwire is devoting this week to all things Great Gatsby. Click here to follow our coverage.

I’m still not sure how I’d made it to age 37 without reading The Great Gatsby, but this much was for sure: I was going to have to. It’s never a bad idea to read the source material when gearing up to review the film adaptation of a highly regarded literary property (though the finite number of hours in the day certainly prevent that notion’s translation from theory to practice), but my editor’s suggestion for a “Gatsby Week” piece on the difficulty of adapting Fitzgerald’s classic to celluloid sort of cinched it. “Ha, ha, funny story, I’ve never read it,” I chortled, and her nonverbal response to that ill-timed bit of mirth made it clear that I’d be doing so sooner rather than later. … Read More

Books

45 Wonderful Fan-Designed Covers for ‘The Great Gatsby’

By Emily Temple on

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has one of the most iconic book covers of all time. Francis Cugat was commissioned to design it while Fitzgerald was still working on the novel, and when he saw the artwork, he liked it so much he told his publisher he had “written it into” the book. This has not prevented Gatsby from being published with multiple jacket treatments over the years. Some are quite lovely indeed, the recent movie tie-in edition not included. The novel has also been a wellspring of inspiration for writers and designers alike, and there are quite a large number of wonderful fan-designed covers floating around on the Internet — created by everyone from established designers to students. Click through to see some of the… Read More

Books

Required Reading List: Jay Gatsby

By Emily Temple on

With Baz Luhrmann’s splashy adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel contender hitting theaters Friday, Flavorwire is devoting this week to all things Great Gatsby. Click here to follow our coverage.

“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously quipped, “even so, they have made me.” In this bi-weekly series, Flavorwire plays professor to some of our favorite pop culture characters, assigning reading lists tailored to their temperaments or — in some cases — designed to make them into slightly better people. After all, even fictional characters can have their lives changed by books. Or so we imagine. This week, we recommend a reading list for the man of the moment, one Jay Gatsby. … Read More

Books

Richard Tuttle’s Incredible One-of-a-Kind Bindings for Classic Books

By Emily Temple on

Put away that e-reader and take a peek at the incredible book cover art of Richard Tuttle. Tuttle, whose work was recently featured at Book Patrol, creates one-of-a-kind bindings for classic novels, interpreting the stories as beautiful, often cheeky sculptures. Tuttle explains: “I make literary artifacts. They are designed to pull books down off the shelf and display them in the salon, gallery or home as if they were works of art, which, of course, they are. Whether binding books with leather, paper, paint, wood, and found artifacts or building sculptures to encase the volumes, I seek to find a perspective that shouts out a piece of the essence of the literary work. I try to put myself in the author’s or character’s mind to say something about the time it was written in; the attitude that is explored and expressed; the magic that makes it a work of art.” Most of these unique editions are available (for a pretty penny) at Franklin Books. Even if you don’t have the cash, you can ogle them to your heart’s content after the jump. … Read More

Books

10 Essential Neo-Noir Authors

By Richard Thomas on

What is neo-noir fiction? It’s contemporary dark fiction. It was built on the backbone of classic noir and hardboiled fiction, but it’s evolved to be so much more than that. It is a genre-bending subgenre that includes edgy literary fiction, as well as fantasy, science fiction, and horror. It also touches on niche storytelling like magical realism, slipstream, transgressive, and the grotesque. There is a movement out there, right now, one that has been heating up over the last ten years, the most recent installment of which, Benjamin Percy’s Red Moon, comes out next week. Here are some of the names you need to know. … Read More

Design

Clever Posters Chart the Colors in Famous Novels

By Emily Temple on

What colors are the insides of your favorite novels? Well, sure, the off-white of a book page — but what about the worlds they create? In artist Jaz Parkinson‘s color charts project, he has created graphic signatures of novels’ visual content, building mini rainbows that correspond to classic works. Needless to say, there’s a lot of red (blood) and white (milk) in A Clockwork Orange, and miles of black in McCarthy’s The Road. … Read More