We’ve been down this road before with Joyce Carol Oates.
Last July, the author with the uncanny ability to write more novels, short stories, essays, and poems than any one human could actually want to read, pissed off a good portion of her Twitter followers by discounting men who are victims of sexual assault in prison while also saying something that read a lot like she was trying to blame Islam for rapes that had been committed in Egypt. … Read More
As Valentine’s Day (not to mention yet another cold night) approaches, you may find yourself in the mood for love. But what if you don’t? Never fear, because all you have to do is pick up a book. Yes, reading is sexy — especially when you’re reading one of these books, which range from literary fiction (with, ahem, some notable scenes) to famously romantic plays to “highbrow academia porn” to real literary erotica.… Read More
Happy birthday to literature’s modernist master, James Joyce. Writers are still finding devastatingly beautiful ways to describe the impact that the Ulysses author continues to have on their work, paying homage to one of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century. Here are ten authors on the Irish novelist’s work, life, and enduring influence. … Read More
As Mark Twain once said, “An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.” We got our latest reminder of that earlier this week, when it was revealed that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s deputy chief of staff arranged for some “traffic problems” for a town whose mayor didn’t endorse the governor during his reelection campaign. Of course, the details of Christie’s involvement aren’t yet clear, but clearly someone in his inner circle intentionally did something crooked. For them (and you), we offer this reading list of books that might be as crooked as they are. … Read More
Not only am I a fan of the franchise, but I also consider the 1985 Chicago Bears the greatest single-season football squad to ever hoist the Vince Lombardi Trophy, so I could see how one could chalk up my judgment that Rich Cohen’s Monsters is one of the finest books on the sport that I’ve ever read to bias. Yet the fact remains that Cohen’s other great books — which have looked at Jewish gangsters, banana barons, Chess Records, and packaged sugar substitutes, while also offering up either small autobiographical bits of Cohen’s life or massive chunks that borderline on memoir — are also favorites of mine. … Read More
No matter how old you are, the back-to-school season holds a certain kind of allure – be it nostalgia for scholarly tradition, the crisping of the days, a Pavlovian need to buy books, or just the satisfaction that you don’t have to be in class ever again. If you’re looking to indulge yourself without the schoolwork, you may take pleasure in another hallowed tradition: the campus novel. That is, books concerning the lives of students, professors, and miscellaneous academics, generally in or around a college. Here are 50 of the… Read More
Who doesn’t sometimes sit around and wish that they could be half as prolific as Joyce Carol Oates? The 75-year-old author falls just after Philip Roth on the list of America’s most decorated writers (both are equally Nobel Prize-less), but unlike the now-retired 80-year-old Roth, Oates hasn’t shown any signs of stopping anytime in the near future. She even shares whatever thoughts pop into her head on her popular Twitter account. Earlier this year, Andy Boyd at PolicyMic extolled the “sublime joys” of following Oates, saying her tweets were like a “parody of the implied author of her stories,” and most of the time it is a total treat for all of us to see an iconic writer writing for us in real time; we get to know what Oates is thinking at that very moment, and we should all be thankful for that. … Read More
“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 eponymous Bling Ring of Sofia Coppola’s newest feature. … Read More
The short story can be a magical thing. It’s a breath, a moment, a captured mood — or an entire teeming world packed into a few pages. Maybe, if it’s really great, it’s both. The only trouble with short stories is that not enough people read them. So, in a series to celebrate Short Story Month (and help you add to your reading list), Flavorwire is asking some contemporary masters of the form to talk about the short stories they love. In this installment, Lindsay Hunter, whose electrifying second collection Don’t Kiss Me is forthcoming in July, recommends one that she can’t just get out of her head. … Read More
In Julie Sarkissian’s wonderful debut novel, Dear Lucy, which hits shelves today, a young woman with a peculiar way of perceiving the world finds herself exiled from her mother’s life, living on a farm where something — Lucy can’t quite figure out what — is wrong, just beneath the surface. Or maybe there’s more than one something. Lucy sets out on a quest to make things right, as well as she can, in a story that’s equal parts sweet and strange. To celebrate the book’s release, we asked Sarkissian to tell us about her favorite creepy farm books — a surprisingly lush category! We always knew something was awry with all those creaky barns. Check out her picks after the jump, and be sure to grab a copy of her book — extra points if you do it tonight at the book’s release party at Brooklyn’s BookCourt. … Read More
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