The 85th Academy Awards air next Sunday, and while the major features categories dominate the golden spotlight, there’s also a lot of talent to be found in the shorts group. While we wait for February 24th, travel back in time to look at ten Oscar-winning shorts of the past that you can watch right… Read More
alice munro
Last-Minute Literary Gifts For Every Member of the Family
Was it just us, or did the holidays totally sneak up on everyone this year? If you’re headed to a family gathering this weekend and scrambling for last-minute gifts for your relatives, don’t forget that you pretty much can’t go wrong with a good book. It’s all a matter of picking the right book for the right relative. Sound hard? Well not to worry, dearest procrastinators, we’ve got you covered. After the jump, read through our suggestions (and our second choices) for books for every member of your family. Let us know what you ended up choosing in the comments! … Read More
The Books That Made the Most ‘Best Of 2012′ Book Lists
December means a lot of things. Our normally latent shopping gene starts itching like crazy, mint-flavored coffee starts sounding like a good idea, and every single media outlet (ourselves included) puts up their “best of” everything lists. Well, ’tis the season. In an effort to distill all those year’s end book round-ups — and let’s face it, be a little meta — we looked at 16 lists from 14 media organizations and counted up the books that tickled the most critics this year. Turns out, they had quite a few differing opinions — on those 16 lists alone, we noted more than 150 unique titles — but also agreed across the board on a few knock-outs. After the jump, feast your eyes on the most popular books of the 2012 best book list season — and let us know if you agree with consensus or think the world’s gone mad in the comments. … Read More
10 New Must-Reads for November
With the power outages and public transport shutdowns in NYC surrounding this week’s hurricane, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past few days curled up reading by candlelight. If you too have used the bad weather as an excuse to tear through your to-read pile, you’re in luck — November is full of opportunities to replenish it. This month, we have a lot of short stories on our plate, in addition to meditations on the hallucinatory and a posthumous collection of essays from one of our very favorite people. Click through to see the books on our must-read list for November, and let us know which ones will be keeping you inside this month in the comments. … Read More
The Flavorpill Fall 2012 Books Forecast
No matter what some may say, this year has already been a great one for literature — and from where we’re sitting, it’s only getting better. This fall promises to be a doozy, with September in particular filled with some serious literary heavy hitters, and enough great reads piled up through the autumn months to get you fat and happy just in time for winter. There’s a little something for everyone: essays, memoir, novels, short story collections, and one beyond-the-borders graphic novel. After the jump, read through our list of the fifteen books we’re most excited about this fall, and then be sure to let us know which reads you’re most excited about tackling in the comments. … Read More
10 Wonderful Short Stories to Read For Free Online
Had she not passed away at the too-young age of 39 from lupus, today would have been legendary Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor’s 87th birthday. To celebrate her legacy of pitch-perfect short stories and razor-sharp wit, we’ve collected a few of our favorite works from some of the best short story writers of all time, all available online — though we can’t promise reading them that way will be as satisfying as hefting a huge tome of collected stories. This is not meant to be a definitive list of the best short stories in the world, but merely a celebration of the form and a collection of ten of our many favorites, limited to those that we could track down online, to make your Sunday afternoon a little better. Click through to read ten stories from some of literature’s greats, and link us to your own favorites in the comments! … Read More
Shortlist for Man Booker Prize Announced
A list of 13 authors from 8 different countries who were nominated for the Man Booker International Prize — which is awarded “to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage” — was released yesterday. The winner will receive an award of £60,000 (approximately $85,000) as well as the ability to refer to him or herself in the third person as a “notable” author. Next month, the MBIP panel will winnow it down to a single winner, who will be announced at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, with an awards ceremony taking place on June 28th in London. Since the prize is awarded every two years, the last prize winner was the unflappable short story writer Alice Munro in 2009. … Read More
5 Immortal Stories About Mortality
We recently heard that Joan Didion has written a memoir about the experience of aging, a subject that, though unavoidable for most of us, is often relegated to the better-left-ignored category of conversation. Though the aches and pains of aging may feel too far away for some of us, or simply too morbid to broach head-on, here are five works of fiction that elegantly capture the ups and downs of a life relived in retrospect. … Read More
Fiction Fix: “Wilderness” by Jean Thompson
The goal of each installment of the Fiction Fix is to present you with a bite-sized capsule of fiction. Operating under the assumption that novels require the kind of commitment you may not have, we scour literary magazines and new story collections to recommend one (just one!) short story that is most certainly worth your… Read More
Go Ask Alice…About Her Man Booker Prize
Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer, has won one of literature’s most heavy-hitting awards, the International Man Booker Prize. Munro is one Canada’s most celebrated writers, and she’s also a writer’s writer, inspiring the kind of gushing usually exhibited only by Jonas Brothers… Read More
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