F

Flavorwire

Karen Russell

Books

20 Highbrow Books to Read on the Beach This Summer

By Emily Temple on

For even the most seasoned of book nerds, a trip to the beach can raise some difficult questions. After all, you don’t want to waste your precious vacation minutes reading something you’ll forget by the time your suntan fades, but a beach towel is also (probably) not the ideal location to tackle Ulysses. With this weekend marking the unofficial start of summer, Flavorwire has you covered with a list of twenty decidedly highbrow but still totally beach-appropriate… Read More

Books

10 (More) Wonderful Short Stories to Read for Free Online

By Emily Temple on

Around this time last year, we gave you a list of a few of our all-time favorite short stories that were available to read online for free. By now, we expect that you’ve read them all, so we thought it was high time to collect a few more. After the jump, ten more short stories that you can read for free — on your phone on the train, while pretending to work, printed out with a cup of tea on the couch — all of them guaranteed to be great (and a few that were suggested by readers on our first go-around). But of course, the Internet abounds with these, so if you’ve a generous spirit, you could even add to our list in the comments. Happy reading. … Read More

Books

10 New Must-Reads for February

By Emily Temple on

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s getting cold out there. February is our traditional hibernation time, so as far as we’re concerned, for the next month we’ll be eschewing nightlife and staying inside with various hot beverages and various room-temperature books. This month, we’re looking forward to blistering essays, masterful short stories, incredible debut novels, and a posthumous book from Maurice Sendak. Sounds good right? But as we all know, February’s a short month, so you’d better get cracking. Let us know what you’re most excited to read over the next few weeks in the comments. … Read More

Books

10 of the Most Twisted Short Stories About Love

By Emily Temple on

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, which has us thinking about affairs of the heart — but not in the Hallmark card way, of course. Yesterday saw the release of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories (an even better title than her last translated collection, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales), and needless to say, the book is full of off-kilter, lurid, even violent attempts at connection. To celebrate the book’s release (and stock you up on reading in advance of Valentine’s Day), we’ve put together a list of ten of our favorite thoroughly messed up short stories about love. But of course, the literary world abounds with these, so read through and add your own twisted favorites in the comments. … Read More

Books

Flavorpill's 30 Most Anticipated Books of 2013

By Emily Temple on

If killer short story collections, triumphant returns, and more delicious-sounding novels than you can shake a stick at sounds like a good thing to you, then 2013 is shaping up to be a banner year for new… Read More

Books

10 Dysfunctional Literary Families We’d Secretly Like to Join

By Emily Temple on

You know the quote: ”Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Whether you believe Tolstoy or not, there’s something alluring about dysfunctional families, especially when they’re strictly literary. This week saw the release of Mark Haddon’s newest novel The Red House, the story of a family cooped up in a country house together for a week of what should be vacation, but ends up being full of family secrets, personal revelations, and complex dynamics. All that aside, we realized that we wouldn’t mind being part of their tragicomedy, and we got to thinking about some of our other favorite literary families that we sort of wish would adopt us. Click through to see which fictional families we picked, and let us know which ones you’d choose in the comments. … Read More

Books

Contemporary Writers and Their Old School Counterparts

By Emily Temple on

This week, we read an article over at The Guardian which suggested that the “anxiety of influence” is waning — that is, that writers publishing today are no longer as closely influenced by the literary canon as they once were, and instead look to their contemporaries. Well, considering that this conclusion was the result of a mathematical study based on the number of “content-free” words like ‘of’, ‘at’ and ‘by,’ we’re not sure how much water it holds, but it inspired us to think about some modern writers who do seem to be carrying the torch for their old school counterparts, whether in topic, thematic style, or character. After all, the past never really goes away — especially in… Read More

Books

Too Young, Too Pretty: When Authors Are Criticized For Their Looks

By Emily Temple on

This week, Nell Freudenberger’s second novel, The Newlyweds hit shelves, and we’d say we’re pretty excited. The book itself is great, but the reappearance of the author reminded us of her past as a new kid on the block, part of that cyclical surge of young, attractive authors that always seem to take a lot of heat, especially from critics and other writers. After all, it’s not every author who is judged in the headlines to be “too young, too pretty, too successful,” but we like to think that with her newest novel, Freudenberger has pushed past that stigma to be taken a bit more seriously, and perhaps enjoyed with a little less jealousy. Others of her good looking brethren have done the same — or have fallen off the face of the planet. Click through to see our round up of a few authors that have been criticized, ridiculed, or simply condescended to for their looks or age, and how they’ve fared since. And no, we’re not going to get into the whole Franzen/Wharton thing. … Read More

News

No Fiction Winner Among This Year’s Pulitzers

By Caroline Stanley on

The 2012 Pulitzer Prize winners were just announced, and there were two major surprises in the bunch. First, David Wood of The Huffington Post took home the company’s first-ever award for national reporting for his “riveting exploration of the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan during a decade of war,” in his Beyond the Battlefield series, beating out reporters from traditional media outlets like the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal. Kind of surprising, right?

But it gets more shocking. You’re never going to believe who nabbed the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. No one. As Sarah Weinmann points out, the last time the Pulitzers failed to award a prize in fiction was back in 1977, when the board vetoed the jury’s selection: A River Runs Through It. And it’s not as if there was a shortage of excellent options among this year’s finalists — while we would have been thrilled to see Karen Russell’s debut novel Swamplandia! score such a big honor, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, are certainly nothing to sneeze at. Click through to check out the full list of winners in the Journalism and Letters, Drama, and Music sections, and let us know in the comments if you think the fiction jurors — Susan Larson, Maureen Corrigan, and Michael Cunningham — have some serious explaining to do. … Read More

Media

Read Through the Finalists for the 2012 National Magazine Awards

By Emily Temple on

Yesterday, the American Society of Magazine Editors announced the finalists for the 2012 National Magazine Awards, which judge American publications as a whole as well as specific articles within them. Bloomberg Businessweek, GQ, New York, The New Yorker and Vice are all nominated for overall excellence in the field of general interest magazines, Glamour, More, O, The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple and W are nominated for women’s interest, and The American Scholar, Aperture, IEEE Spectrum, The New Republic and Virginia Quarterly Review are nominated in the “Thought-Leader” category.

You should take a peek at those titles at your leisure, and check out the full list of finalists here, but we were more interested in the finalists in most of the major article categories. We’ve put together a handy list for you, with links to the nominated work. Yet again, we were flabbergasted and discouraged by the lack of female writers here — of the categories we looked at, they are only nominated in the Public Interest and Fiction sections. Regardless, there’s a lot of good writing here, so click through to get a handle on the ASME nominees, and let us know who you think should take home the prizes in the comments. … Read More