Authors are a strange, particular bunch, with often weird habits and distinctive manners of dress. Marcel Proust, apparently, was so fond of his velveteen gloves that he wore them to bed (perhaps to preserve his smooth smooth hands), and countless authors have affected capes, walking sticks, and various other accoutrements worthy of acclaim. Some, however, have become icons in their own right, inextricably linked to their authors (and thus all the easier for turning into Halloween costumes). We love a good pipe, so we’ve collected some of the most iconic author accessories of all time — click through to see our picks, and let us know if we’ve missed your favorite writerly hat, hair clip, or affectation in the comments.
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Sometimes you love a book — or an author’s body of works — so much that you need an outlet that allows you to express that love. Sure, book club might help a little, but if you’re a truly die-hard fan, you might find that you need a little more tradition (or maybe full-on period costumes) to really inspire you. After all, nothing makes literature come to life like actually incorporating it into the modern-day world, whether by holding nonstop readings, visiting grave sites, or carrying around special tokens of appreciation and winking at other insiders. So if you’ve wondering how best to salute your favorite authors and novels, click through to read up on a few literary traditions ripe for the joining, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!
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The internet has been hopping this past week with the news that Lil’ Wayne is set to release Gone Till November, a memoir based on the journals he kept during his eight month stint at Rikers Island, this fall. Weezy’s transformation to memoirist got us to thinking about other famous literary jailbirds — whether they wrote in jail, wrote after coming out of jail, or were imprisoned for their writing. As you might imagine, going to prison seems to be almost a rite of passage for a canonical author — at least it used to be — so it looks like Weezy is heading down the right path. Click through to read our list of ten famed literary jailbirds, and let us know if we missed any of your favorite authors-behind-bars in the comments.
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If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: everyone’s favorite hedonist, Dorian Gray.
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[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published June 12, 2011.] It’s a well-known stereotype that many literary authors are also raging drunkards. Which, forgive us, doesn’t make us want to emulate them any less. In fact, now that it’s summer, we can’t think of anything better than to sip a cool drink while typing away at our — er, laptops — out on the porch in the sweet summer night air. So in the interest of pure academic speculation, we’ve comprised a roundup of some of our favorite writers and the drinks they favored during all their late work nights and boozy afternoons. We’re not saying that downing a mojito will make you write like Hemingway, but hey — it couldn’t hurt. Click though for our list, and let us know what beverages you favor during your own deep contemplations and compositions.
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Tipped off by a Facebook post by literary scene fixture Miss Sara Rosen, we just discovered the most amazing treasure trove of handcrafted, miniature versions of some of our favorite writers of all time over on Etsy — and they’re all available for purchase. Just think, you can make a tiny Kurt Vonnegut chat up a pint-sized Flannery O’Connor! Joyce Carol Oates can have a deep conversation about heartbreak with Sylvia Plath! JRR Tolkien and Isaac Asimov can arm wrestle to determine who is more popular! The possibilities are endless. Assuming that you’d enjoying geeking out over these as much as we did, we’ve rounded up a slide show after the jump. Click through to check it out, and let us know in the comments which doll you think bears the closest resemblance to the author who inspired it. Read More »
When you spend your days writing about culture, broadly defined, the strangest juxtapositions start to present themselves. Here at Flavorpill, where we might hop from Katherine Mansfield to Katy Perry in the space of a single post, we’re always noticing the ways in which high culture and pop culture complement each other. That, perhaps, is why it recently occurred to us that Ron Swanson and Ernest Hemingway must have wildly similar personalities — which led us to the thought experiment below: TV Characters and Their Literary Counterparts. Follow along with us after the jump, where we compare modernist authors to fictional teenagers and great humorists to fake-news hosts, and add your own pairings in the comments. Read More »
Erecting a statue of someone to honor their memory and ensure their immortality seems a little dated in the digital age. But history buffs and travel-junkies still go thousands of miles to see monuments to their favorite authors, artists, and historical figures, so there must be something elementally compelling about it. Maybe it’s just us, but we think there’s something satisfying about a life-size (or larger than life) statue of a beloved figure, able to be touched and taking up space in the world. To that end, we’ve collected a series of statues of some of our favorite authors, from the surreal (Kafka) to the cheeky (Hemingway) to the monumentally brooding (Tolstoy). Of course, if you’re famous enough to have one statue erected in your honor, you’re probably famous enough to have more than one, so of course some of these sculptures are only one in a series of renditions (we’re looking at you, Shakespeare), but they happen to be our favorites. Click through to catch a glimpse of some famous authors in the bronze, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorite literary sculptures in the comments!
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The grandson of famed playwright Oscar Wilde claims a new play, Constance, set to open on Friday at London’s King’s Head Theater is not Wilde’s “final play” as the theater company boasts, the Guardian reports. “It is dishonest to foist this on the public,” Merlin Holland says, calling the play “a pretty appalling piece of work” that is “marginally altered in order to sound a bit like Oscar Wilde.” The problem is that, although Wilde sketched the plot for Constance, it was actually written by several other playwrights before it became the play that is about to open.
“I’m completely comfortable calling it a play by Oscar Wilde,” says Adam Spreadbury-Maher, the artistic director of the theater. He adds that the production is careful to credit the lineage of the play and the various hands it passed through. But he isn’t doing himself any favors when he says the production is similar to how Damien Hirst “doesn’t paint all his paintings.” Probably not the best analogy to use when trying to convince people to pay good money to see Oscar Wilde’s last play. [via ArtsBeat]
We hate to be the ones to say it, but the end of the summer romance is nigh, dear readers. As August becomes September, a noticeable chill lingers in the air; the cold creeps in slowly, hardening hearts and delivering sang-froid to young and old alike. In preparation, we suggest you arm yourselves with our modest arsenal of literary quotes that can be administered whenever you feel the time is right. Good luck, and let us know in the comments section what quotes have helped you get through a difficult breakup.
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