This week saw the release of Leigh Stein’s debut novel The Fallback Plan, a hilarious take on the post-college, self-absorbed, 20-something in existential crisis. We were pleased to see it, because in general, it seems like the 20s are a little bit of a dead area in fiction — there are hundreds of books about making it as a teenager (or even as a child prodigy) and hundreds more about grown-up issues and disaffected men in their 30s and 40s, but fewer about the post-college, pre-life choices period that many young Americans seem to be wallowing in these days. However, to give all you angsty 20-somethings in existential crisis mode something to read while you’re waiting out the weird years, we’ve created an absolutely required reading list, for bathtubs and bar stools alike. That’s right: you have homework, a little direction. Don’t you feel better? And hey, maybe you should read them while listening to these. Click through to fill your home-made bookshelves with the tomes on our required reading list for your quarter life crisis, and then try to buck up a little. It’s not so bad.
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Since the world is going to end this year and everything, it’s never been a better time to follow the advice of P.J. O’Rourke, who recommends that you “always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” Not that anyone will be around to see you, we guess. Luckily, there are a ton of really exciting books coming out this year, including many that we’d be racing to read apocalypse or no, and good looks aside. Since publishing schedules are not often announced super-far in advance, and they’re subject to change based on a million factors, this is really a first half of 2012 list, heavy on spring releases, to be followed by a second-half of the year list in the summer. Click through to check out the books we’re most looking forward to in the first half of this year (boy was it hard to narrow it down to just ten!), and let us know which others you’re having trouble waiting for in the comments.
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There’s no polite way to say it. The star of Roberto Bolaño’s long-awaited novel, The Third Reich, is a geek — a gamer geek, to be precise. And it’s the real-world implications of his all-consuming pastime that underlie the book’s action, even as he relaxes on the beach with his beautiful girlfriend and parties into the night with new friends. The immense role gaming plays in Bolaño’s atmospheric, slow-burning novel, written before The Savage Detectives and 2666 and serialized by The Paris Review in advance of its publication last month, got us thinking about the many memorable geeks contemporary literature has given us. A selection of our favorites is after the jump; add yours in the comments. Read More »
Within literature’s greatest books lives another library of books, unpublished and unwritten, nested in other books, imagined by their authors and materialized only in the imaginations of their readers — a painfully vast body of potentially brilliant work that we’ll never get to hold in our hands. That’s not to say that every meta-book is a must-read; take for example The Dictionary of the Finnish Language by Caprinulge, which features in Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow – completely unreal and yet completely not something we’d choose to leaf through. Similarly, the white-supremacist The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard, thought up by Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby is not all that high on our wish list. But then there are titles that, wholly made up, sound like they might be even more captivating than the books they live in. And it’s those that we never stop hoping will one day be in print. After the jump, peruse 16 titles we’d add to our bookshelves, if only we could.
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Now that it’s September, many of you are probably heading off to school — whether for the first time or the fourth — and even if you’re past school-age, the season does things to your heads, filling them with number 2 pencils and three hole punches and dreams of Philosophy textbooks. Or, at least, that’s all we can think about. College is an inspirational time, particularly for novelists: there is an entire genre based on the campus novel, including books about professors, students, and anyone else who spends a serious amount of time on the hallowed university grounds. In honor of the new school year, we’ve put together a list of great novels set at real-life colleges, whether explicitly stated or thinly veiled in their fictional forms. If you’re starting school this fall, you’d do well to check out what other people think of your new home and what you might expect from your next few years there, and if you’ve already finished, well, everyone likes to read about their alma mater, hopefully shouting out, ‘that’s not how it was!’ and ‘look, that’s me!’ in equal measure. Click through to see our list, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorite college novels in the comments.
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Hey there, bookworms, it’s National Book Lovers Day! How’s about celebrating by, um, watching a movie? (Our logic is less than ironclad, we’ll admit.) Sure, the moving picture doesn’t always do right by the written word, but a few fine films have celebrated literature and writers in ways memorable, thought-provoking, and entertaining; we’ve assembled ten of our favorites after the jump, with plenty of room in the comments for you to throw in your own.
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1. A creepy new promo for season six of Dexter dropped online yesterday. Watch it here, and starting counting the days until fall. [via Pop Candy]
2. Patti Smith will make her acting debut in an upcoming episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent that’s based on all of the Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark injuries. Apparently she’s a big fan of the series. [via AOL]
3. There’s currently a rumor floating around that Terrence Malick is prepping a six-hour version of his Palme d’Or winner, The Tree of Life (which currently runs at 138 minutes), but as Slashfilm points out, these stories are often “a fantasy cooked up in the imaginations of hopeful audiences.”
4. Woody Allen’s latest film Midnight in Paris — which has been positively received by critics — is expanding to more cities! According to Sony Pictures Classics it will soon be playing on 1,038 screens, making it the widest release of any of his films. [via ArtsBeat]
5. This sounds promising: Darren Aronofsky has signed on to direct the pilot episode of Michael Chabon’s new series for HBO, Hobogoblin, which tells the story of “a group of magicians and con men trying to take down Hitler.” [via Vulture]
Bonus link: Where Are the Famous Album Cover Kids Now?
It’s strange to see a TV character reading a book, since it’s such a solitary activity. But do we really expect them to reference imaginary novels in conversations in their fictional universes? Sometimes there’s a break in the narrative and the outside world comes into the story, alerting the viewer to the fact that both worlds can be fluid. This happens pretty frequently in Mad Men, where time-appropriate novels are read and discussed with bartenders, spouses, or in secret in the ladies’ lounge. (We’re looking at you, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.) Last year, we created a summer reading list of books referenced in the show. This time around, we were inspired by this Tumblr post to expand our focus to include more series, so get ready to discover what your favorite characters leaf through on a lazy afternoon when you’re not around.
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Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but um, we kind of do it all the time. In fact, half the fun of that anachronistic pleasure known as bookstore browsing is to indulge in that very vice — allowing certain covers or color schemes to catch your eye and draw you over to a tome you might never have picked up otherwise. That’s not to say that the covers, or even the descriptions on the back or inside flaps are necessarily good indicators of the book itself. Some cover designs achieve a perfect pairing of style and substance, some are to the point, and some are wildly off-base, inducing disgust and/or laughter when you actually read the book in question. Enter our new favorite tumblr: the delightfully witty Plausible-Seeming but Tonally Inappropriate Book Covers, in which a mystery artist (artists?) imagines possible bad book covers for some of our modern classics, complete with brilliant (and consistent, and upsetting) accolades from modern American hero Jonathan Franzen. Click through to see some of our favorites and let us know what you think in the comments.
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In response to Russ Marshalek’s excellent post on devastatingly sad books last week, we’ve decided to try and lift your spirits a little during this rainy week by suggesting books that are great escapes from the incessant grind of daily existence.
Last year, Wayne Gooderham wrote a thoughtful piece in the Guardian about emerging from the fog of depression by reading Saul Bellow’s 1964 epistolary tale of Moses E. Herzog — a brilliant but broken intellectual who is constantly writing letters, many which are never sent. Gooderham writes that Bellow renders “a potentially bleak topic in such a poignant and gently humorous way” in Herzog, which is the mark of a very good book. Since we’ve always been suckers for a love story, many of the selections on our list involve affairs of the heart, although we are also inspired by political nonfiction and comedy when they are done well. As always, we realize that any list made will be contentious, so please feel free to suggest alternatives in the comments section below.
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