There are so many books out there these days that sometimes — even with every media outlet doing their own Best-Of list this month — it’s hard to decide what to read. To combat the deluge of recommendations, we generally lean towards taking advice from those we consider to be most in the know: our favorite authors themselves. After all, if they can write prose that delights us so much, they must surely be able to recognize it in the work of others, right? Right. And as Henry David Thoreau said, “read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” With that in mind, we’ve collected a few of our favorite authors’ year-end recommendations from around the web. Now, authors are flighty creatures, and many of their 2011 book lists include books published in other years. But we’re confident that you’ll still manage to glean some holiday vacation reading suggestions or last-minute gifts from their choices. Click through to check out our favorite authors’ favorite books from the past year, and if your to-read stack isn’t monumental enough by the end of this list (or even if it is), we highly recommend that you check out the sources for each list for many more recommendations from many more great writers. Read More »
Since Lorrie Moore is one of our favorite contemporary authors and Friday Night Lights is one of our all-time favorite TV series, you can only imagine how tickled we were to come across the former waxing philosophical about the latter — which just so happens to be one of her guilty pleasures — in the upcoming August 18 issue of The New York Review of Books.
Here’s a quick sample: “Friday Night Lights is held together by a cast of disconcertingly attractive young people with pink, wavy mouths (a few seem straight out of a Beverly Hills casting agency, marring slightly the verisimilitude). They play kids named Tim Riggins, Tyra Collette, Jason Street, Lyla Garrity, and Matt Saracen, whose names envelop and suit them better than any others could, including the actors’ own. Equally attractive is the only high-functioning family in Dillon: that of Coach Eric Taylor and his wife, Tami, who are played with deep and beautiful concentration and chemistry by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton. The Taylors often speak politely over each other, simultaneously, as if in an Altman film, and when they genuinely lose their tempers, which is seldom, it is transfixing, even when the sparring sounds mild.” Sigh. We didn’t know it was possible to miss FNL any more than we already did. Head over to the NYRB’s website to read the full feature.
As a fitting finale to National Short Story Month, we asked the talented crew over at One Story to name their ten favorite epigrammatic tales. Tanya Rey, the managing editor, explained via e-mail that their choices are in no particular order, so anti-Salingerists are advised to not get all huffy just because JD leads the list. Tanya writes, “Certain authors (e.g., Cheever, Moore, Johnson, Barthleme) were nominated more than once, for different stories, so we tried to choose the most ‘classic’ of those stories. This was not exactly a scientific or objective process.” However, we stand behind the choices because they’re some of our favorites as well. What do you think, dear readers?
We’re the first to admit that, sometimes, the best cure for a hard week, a long day or just a rainy weekend is a really sad book. One of the saddest, and most compelling, to come to our attention this week is Michael Kimball’s gutting new novel, Us, about the slow death of a spouse and its effect on her devoted husband, who can merely watch as the person he loves begins to fade away. We consumed the entire book in one subway ride, and got more than a few strange glances our way as Kimball’s novel caused us to convulse with sobs. It wasn’t until someone asked us if we actually enjoyed Us (we did) that we begin musing on the strange relationship between sad books and ourselves as readers, and we wondered: what other books are out there for those who, like us, enjoy the occasional full-body sob and feeling of abject desolation as we’re absorbed into our reading material?
Before we began casting our nets, we set a few parameters for ourselves. First, no young adult novels. If we’d gathered YA, it would dominate the list. Yes, we love Where The Red Fern Grows, but we had to draw the line somewhere. Second, no books where an animal’s death serves as the emotional linchpin (we’re looking at you, Marley & Me). What we ended up with were 10 of the most emotionally wrecking books that we absolutely love. Did we miss your favorite? Please tell us in the comments.
1. Bruce Springsteen, the Killers, Jon Bon Jovi, and Lucinda Williams are set to contribute to a forthcoming album of Kinks covers by former frontman Ray Davies. [via TwentyFourBit]
2. In case you were wondering, Lil Wayne is allowed to bring his diamond-implanted teeth to Riker’s Island. [via Slate]
3. Is this new trailer for The Karate Kid remake more exciting than the first one? [via Yahoo!]
4. Jonah Hill will star in The Sitter, a new David Gordon Green comedy that’s inspired by Adventures in Babysitting. [via THR]
5. It was announced yesterday that books by Sherman Alexie, Barbara Kingsolver, Lorraine M. López, Lorrie Moore and Colson Whitehead are finalists for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. We interviewed Moore about A Gate at the Stairshere. [via WaPo]
Bonus Giveaway: We use Yahoo! Search to help find the top culture stories of the day. Now we’re giving you the chance to play editor, and you just might win a trip to Coachella.
Use Yahoo! Search to find an interesting link about The Kinks, and drop it below in the comments below. Our favorite entry will receive a copy of The Kinks Greatest Hits 1970-86 (2CD/DVD), and more importantly, be entered to win a VIP trip for two to Coachella. Topics will be changing throughout the week, so get your search on and keep playing to increase your chances of winning!
1. Madonna and Scarlett Johansson both made cameo appearances on this weekend’s Ryan Reynold-hosted episode of Saturday Night Live.
2. Contrary to alarmist tweets sparked by a false hospitalization report on TMZ, Maya Angelou is not dead. [via Reuters]
3. CBS’s The Big Bang Theory has become this season’s highest-rated live-action comedy among young adults. [via NYT]
4. Lorrie Moore isn’t sure if she understands Understanding Lorrie Moore. [via A.V. Madison]
5. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore is launching an art book publisher. [via Jacket Copy]
We know you love us, but it’s impossible that you’ve read everything that we’ve posted this week — unless you’ve got a really boring temp job, subscribe to our RSS feed, or have internet access in a low-security prison. To that end, here are links to ten of our most popular stories of the past week. Enjoy these links, and have a happy holiday weekend!
It’s been more than a decade since a new Lorrie Moore book has graced the bookshelves. A lot has changed since Birds of America took flight in 1998, but Moore’s trenchant, witty, and deeply wrought prose reemerges just as we remembered it; and while books not concerning boy wizards or teenage vampires are rarely events nowadays, Moore’s astonishing A Gate at the Stairs deserves to be fetishized. Read More »
Lorrie Moore is a writer’s writer. Though fellow author Jonathan Lethem attested in this week’s New York Times Book Review that he only knows one (“one”) reader who dislikes Lorrie Moore, we’ve recently discovered a good number of people — highly-educated urbanites all — who are unfamiliar with Moore’s work in its entirety. Judging from the maelstrom of press anticipation for Moore’s latest release, A Gate at the Stairs, we feel compelled to address precisely what makes Moore so worthy of the “great author” banner held aloft over Pynchon and other, customarily male, writers of her generation. Read More »
Have you consulted the Flavorpill food pyramid lately? You’ll notice that we recommend a weekly dose of Fiction Fix as an essential part of your healthy cultural diet. How come? Well, you may not have time for novels, but short stories are like Flintstones vitamins: quick, fun, and good for you! Read this one, and don’t forget to grab a lollipop on your way out.
There’s a new story from Lorrie Moore, master of Midwestern yarns, in this week’s New Yorker. Adapted from Moore’s forthcoming novel, A Gate at the Stairs, “Childcare” introduces us to Tassie, a farm girl who goes away to college, where she has her first brushes with both Chinese food (“These odd Chinese vegetables — fungal and gnomic in their brown sauce — had for me the power of an adventure or a rite, a statement to be savored”) and liberal education:
Twice a week, a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie. Read More »
, and more importantly, be entered to win a VIP trip for two to Coachella. Topics will be changing throughout the week, so get your search on and keep playing to increase your chances of winning!
took flight in 1998, but Moore’s trenchant, witty, and deeply wrought prose reemerges just as we remembered it; and while books not concerning boy wizards or teenage vampires are rarely events nowadays, Moore’s astonishing 
deserves to be fetishized.
