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Books

19th Century Writers Who Are Even More Relevant Today

By Emily Temple on

Mary Shelley has some serious staying power. The author was born a whopping 215 years ago today, and her work is more relevant now than ever. Not only is Frankenstein, which Shelley began writing when she was eighteen years old, still ubiquitous in classrooms, but the cultural phenomenon of the cobbled-together monster has and continues to inspire and inform artists of every stripe (Tim Burton’s rebooted Frankenweenie is only the most recent example, we think you’ve probably heard of a few more). To celebrate the life and legacy of this fantastic author, we’ve but together a list of a few 19th century writers who are continually — and sometimes exponentially — culturally relevant in our time. Though some of these authors did garner some amount of acclaim during their own lifetimes, we’d venture that they’re all much more famous and more important to the culture at large today. Click through to check out our list, and as always, add any writers you think we’ve missed in the comments. … Read More

Books

A Brief Survey of Unlikely Literary Friendships

By Emily Temple on

It’s a well known fact that, like any contemporaries in a wide artistic field, authors like to hang out together. It makes sense — who else could a writer gripe to, swap critiques with, and steal ideas from? But sometimes we’re a little surprised as to the pairs that pop up in literary history — whether because of huge age differences, disparate personalities, or just issues of accessibility. Click through to see a few pairs of famous unlikely literary friendships that blossomed nonetheless, and if we’ve missed your favorite odd couple, let us know about it in the comments. … Read More

Books

The Future of American Fiction: An Interview with Claire Vaye Watkins

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’re launching 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 from now through August, we’ll bring you a short interview with one of the writers we think is instrumental in defining that direction. … Read More

Books

10 Books to Put Hair On Your Chest

By Emily Temple on

Of all the emblems of masculinity in pop culture, one of the most enduring also happens to be one of our favorite writers: the big game hunting, gruff talking, bullfighting enthusiast war hero, Ernest Hemingway. Today being the 113th anniversary of the author’s birth, we decided to honor him with a little list of books that might help you live up to the Hemingway memory by putting a little hair on your chest — totally metaphoric hair, that is (well, probably). Click through to see our reading list for tough guys and gals of all persuasions, and let us know which books you’d add in the comments. … Read More

Books

Meet the Modern Descendants of Your Favorite Authors

By Emily Temple on

As you probably know, here at Flavorpill, we’re fascinated by just about every aspect of the lives of our favorite authors — including what happened after them. This week saw the release of Tigers in Red Weather, a sultry, pitch-perfect literary thriller penned by Liza Klaussmann, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville. Though her novel reminds us more of Fitzgerald’s gilded sneaking than Melville’s brutal sea voyage, we were inspired by her success to look up a few more of our favorite authors’ modern-day descendants. Just, you know, to check in. If you’re as addicted to prying as we are, see what they’re all up to after the jump. … Read More

Books

Open Thread: Is ‘Moby-Dick’ the Great American Novel?

By Emily Temple on

Everyone knows that one of a father’s greatest joys is to pass on the things that he loves to his children (a mother’s too, for that matter, but it’s Father’s Day season). In “Trust Me on This,” a great essay series at Salon running through Father’s Day, writers, musicians, athletes and actors answer the question: ”What… Read More

Books

Classic Novels and the Filmmakers Who Were Born to Direct Them

By Emily Temple on

This week, we found out that Guy Ritchie is on board to helm a Warner Brothers adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s literary classic Treasure Island, a pairing that — given Ritchie’s gift for madcap, stylized adventure movies — we think is going to be pretty awesome. Inspired by this news, and given that we’re rather unsatisfied with many of the cinematic adaptations of classic novels that actually exist, we’ve come up with a dream list of some of our favorite classic novels and the filmmakers we think would be perfect to direct them. Click through to check out our list of book-director pairings that were totally meant to be, and let us know who you think should direct your own favorite classic novel in the comments. … Read More

Pop Culture

A Peek Inside the Notebooks of Famous Authors, Artists and Visionaries

By Emily Temple on

It’s no secret that we at Flavorpill are fascinated by the marginalia of our favorite artists’ lives — we swoon over their doodles, dig through their sketchbooks, and posthumously ogle their beach photos. Recently, aided by one of our favorite Tumblr destinations for literary ephemera, Fuck Yeah, Manuscripts!, we’ve indulged in a little more snooping, and put together this collection of a few of the notebooks, journals and diaries of some of our favorite creative minds — authors, artists, actors, musicians, scientists — so as to better get to know their inner selves. Click through to page through the notebooks of a few famous creatives, and let us know which one looks the most like your own in the comments. … Read More

Books

10 Epidemically Overrated Books

By Emily Temple on

Last week, we read a fun article over at PWxyz entitled “We Fix the Top 100 Novels List,” wherein the Publisher’s Weekly staff sounded off on which novels they’d add to the Modern Library’s ubiquitous Top 100 — and which they’d take away. The article got us thinking about which novels we think are lauded entirely too much, whether by the press or the public at large. Now, keep in mind that this isn’t a list of bad books — it’s a list of good books that (to our minds) just seem to get more accolades than they deserve — and it is, and can only be, based on our humble opinion. Click through to read our list of terrifically, epidemically, perpetually overrated books, and add to (or subtract from) our picks in the comments. … Read More

Books

Literary Classics With Slang Makeovers

By Emily Temple on

Today marks the release of On the Bro’d, a parody of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel in which the entire book is translated into bro-speak. In case you’re not quite sure what that means, here’s a quote you may recognize, totally bro-ified: “The only bros for me are the mad awesome ones, the ones who are mad to chug, mad to party, mad to bone, mad to get hammered, desirous of all the chicks at Buffalo Wild Wings, the ones who never turn down a Natty Light, but chug, chug, chug like f*cking awesome players exploding like spiders across an Ed Hardy shirt and in the middle you see the silver skull pop and everybody goes, “Awww, sh*t!” Yep — and you can read even more over at the On the Bro’d website. Inspired by the whole idea, we decided to take an amateur hand to translating a few of our other favorite classic novels in various kinds of slang. Click through to see what we came up with, and feel free to do some of your own translations in the comments. … Read More