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Ben Lerner

Books

10 Books That Could Save Your Life

By Emily Temple on

This week marked the release of Reality Hunger author David Shields’ newest book, How Literature Saved My Life, a wonderfully meandering meditation on reading, writing, and the reason for art. In that spirit, we offer ten books that just might save your life — some which Shields mentions in his latest, some of which are our own favorites.… Read More

Books

The Future of American Fiction: An Interview with Ben Lerner

By Geoff Mak on

If you haven’t noticed, we spend a lot of time thinking about literature here in the Flavorpill offices, digging through its past, weighing its current state, and imagining its future. Take a look at our bookshelves and you’ll find us reading everything from Nobel Prize winners to age-old classics to paperbacks printed at the bookstore down the street. Call it Chick-Lit, Hysterical Realism, Ethnic-Lit, or Translit — if it’s good fiction, we’ll be talking about it. So this summer, we launched The Future of American Fiction: an interview series expanding on that endless conversation about books we love, and yes, the direction of American fiction, from the people who’d know. Every Tuesday through the end of August, we’ll bring you a short interview with one of the writers we think is instrumental in defining that direction. … Read More

Books

Bedside Book Snooping: Photos of Our To-Read Piles

By Emily Temple on

Everyone always wants to know what everyone else is reading, in our experience — if only to get some good ideas for ourselves. This month, in lieu of our periodical staff reading list, we decided to take a more visual (and slightly more voyeuristic) route, and asked Flavorpill staffers to snap a photo of their to-read piles — or whatever pile of books happened to be haunting them. Apparently as a group, we enjoy books with Big Important Questions for titles (we found more than one instance of both Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and the galley of Wilhelm Reich’s Where’s the Truth?), but other than that, we span the spectrum of messy and neat, paperback-crazed and hardcover-happy, with everything from design magazines to biographies to the hot, slim new fiction release sleeping next to our heads. Click through to snoop through the piles of books in a few of your devoted Flavorpill staffers’ bedrooms, and then let us know what you own bedside table looks like in the comments. … Read More

Books

The Official Flavorpill Bookshelf: May Staff Reading Picks

By Emily Temple on

We don’t think we’re congratulating ourselves too much if we consider our office a bookish one. But what’s the fun in being bookish if you can’t share what novels are keeping you up at night, get suggestions from other literature nerds, and gossip about what’s next on your reading list? That’s why we’ve embarked on a monthly mission to share our virtual staff bookshelf with you (you can see past bookshelves here and here), so you can check out what books are on our minds and chime in with your own. Click through to check out our aggregated staff bookshelf, and read what a few members of the Flavorpill family have to say about their reading lists, and then let us know what’s in your own read/reading/to read piles in the comments! … Read More

Books

12 Great Small Press Books Recommended by Literary Insiders

By Emily Temple on

According to the literary powers that be, March is Small Press Month, so before the month is out, we decided we’d better get to talking about a few of the great books — and there are many — published by the tinier houses. We reached out to a few publishers, editors, and publicists of small presses and asked them to recommend some of their favorite books recently released by other indie outfits. They responded in force, suggesting novels, short story collections, works of poetry and works in translation to add to our ever growing list of must-read books. Click through to check out twelve amazing books, all published by small presses in the last year or so, and let us know your own favorites in the comments. … Read More

Books

The New York Public Library’s 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award Finalists Announced

By Emily Temple on

Yesterday, the New York Public library’s Young Lions Fiction Award announced their 2012 finalists, and we must say, they’ve come up with quite a list. The award, which celebrates “the works of young authors carving deep impressions in the literary world,” is given annually to a young American author — aged 35 or younger… Read More

Books

With a Bang: The Best Debut Novels of 2011

By Emily Temple on

In what seems like a pretty clear argument against all the publishing industry doomsday hype, 2011 has been an uncommonly good year for debut novels. This year, it is more evident than ever that yes, people are still writing, publishing and buying great new fiction (and non-fiction, of course, but that’s a point for another post). Four of the New York Times‘s five best novels of 2011 are first novels, which seems to us to reflect the nature of the year. Here, we’ve picked out our favorites from the pack, all from first-time novelists that we can’t wait to read more from. Click through to see our list, and let us know your own favorite debut novels of the year in the comments. … Read More

Books

Gift Guide: New Books for Every Member of the Family

By Emily Temple on

Picking out gifts for your loved ones can be one of the most difficult parts of the holiday season. Not only that, but for some reason, picking out books for other people is a lot harder than just picking out a sweater in red or blue. After all, you’re hoping that the recipient will spend hours in rapt attention with your gift, so you have to choose wisely, and you can’t just give the same book to your whole list the way some people give out gift baskets to everyone they know. To help you out while you’re making these monumental decisions, we’ve collected some suggestions of new books for every member of the family — from your nosy aunt to that post-pimply cousin who just made it through puberty. Click through to check out our list, and let us know which books you’re giving to your loved ones this holiday season in the comments. … Read More

Books

10 Contemporary Southern and Midwestern Poets You Should Know

By Kathleen Massara on

Since there was a dearth of poets from the Midwest and South in our last poetry post, we’d like to like to call attention to ten emerging poets from this giant swath of land who are deserving of our attention — some of whom you mentioned in the previous comments section. See? We do listen. Jennifer Karmin extolled the virtues of living as a poet in the Midwest in an e-mail: “In a nutshell [it has] cheap rent, great teaching opportunities, and amazing creative community.” If you’re interested in more established poets (like Ohio’s own Rita Dove), you might want to pick up Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, which was recently published by FSG. Or, if you’re interested in some poetic justice, the Oxford American wrote about contemporary Afro-Mississippian poets a few years back. If nothing else, we suggest you read Keno Davis’s “Hea’m (Heaven),” which features one of our favorite lines in modern poetry: “I wonder if there’s a Hooters in Heaven ‘cause I’m gonna need something to do on Monday nights.” As always, if there’s anyone we missed, please bring it to our attention in the comments section below. … Read More