Writers get a bad rap in the looks department: if you spend your time holed up and scribbling away, you must be a scrawny, pasty artist type, mustn’t you? Not so! There are a plethora of attractive and well-formed writers, both in history and today, that completely demolish such stereotypes, and whose likenesses we’ve collected here. Now don’t get us wrong — of course we believe that the stuff in their heads is much more important that the shape of their heads (or the shape of their bodies, for that matter) but that doesn’t mean we can’t applaud them for excelling in multiple areas. Plus, it’s well past time to make literature sexy again, and if writers can replace actors as pinups in our culture of ogling, we’ll be happy campers. We’ve tried to pick some contemporary authors as well as some more classic choices, and an equal number of men and women, just to be fair to everyone. Click through to see the authors we think have the best literary figures in history, and make sure to tell us your own picks in the comments.
Everyone loves a good cosmic event, and as earthlings, we are especially obsessed with our slimmer, sleeker neighbor, the moon. Tonight, the ‘Super Moon’ will appear in the sky, blowing the minds of black cats, werewolves and stargazers everywhere. We see the Super Moon when the moon gets full at the same time as its orbit brings it to its closest point to earth, a coincidence that only happens every twenty years or so, so it’s a pretty special night. And because we like to herald every natural event with nerdery (and assuming that no one is going to fall for the Great Moon Hoax again) we thought we’d celebrate by collecting a little late night reading list to prepare you for tonight’s moon-watching activities. Click through to bone up on your lunar literature with our essential Super Moon reading list, and let us know which of your favorite moon-based books we’ve missed.
Artists love other artists. Perhaps there is an electric connection between two people whose minds are always whirring, or literary snobs can’t bear to date laymen, or perhaps for some writers, the only way they know their partner will understand them is if that person is also a writer. No matter what it is, there’s something powerful about a couple on the same team in the same industry. Plus, everybody loves a celebrity couple, and we particularly love literary celebrity couples. We like to imagine their arguments as poetic and their children as geniuses, and their lives spent sitting around in oaken rooms drinking brandy and scribbling between loving looks. Well, maybe that’s not realistic. But to each their own celebrity fantasy, right? Click through for our list of ten of our favorite real-life literary power couples — and let us know which ones we’ve missed in the comments!
Authors often appear in their own works of fiction as thinly veiled surrogates — Kilgore Trout is widely believed to be Kurt Vonnegut’s alter ego, and Hunter S. Thompson is barely distinguishable from Raoul Duke — but occasionally authors also infiltrate their own stories as characters named for themselves. Whether purely narcissistic or a tool of artistic commentary, the author-as-character literary technique lends an element of surrealism to the reading experience and draws attention to both the act of narration and the act of creation — as well as their shared unreliability. Check out these novels in which the author appears as himself (or at least a fictionalized version thereof) and see for yourself.
[Editor's note: Flavorwire is counting down our most popular features of 2010. This post comes in at position number 1. It was originally published November 9, 2010.] The Guardian recently ran an article in which Rick Gekoski remarked on the disappearance of essential cultural books. He argued that a few decades ago, “there was a canon, which wasn’t limited to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Scott Fitzgerald. You could assume people had read the hot contemporary books; when they hadn’t, it occasioned not merely puzzlement, but disapproval.” Well, Mr. Gekoski, we beg to differ. Here’s a short list of books that have found a place in Generation X’s (and for that matter, Y’s and W’s, too) common culture; books that people know about, relate to, and converge around, all from the last 25 years. Please share any other literary touchstones that are also part of this contemporary canon in the comments section.
Unlike most other gift options, books manage to be simultaneously personal and safely neutral. The giver and the receiver each benefit from the literary implications of such a categorical choice, leaving only the substance of the title in question as the remaining variable. To ease the options of what to pick, we’ve combed this year’s releases for the best books that will suit the different types of people in your life.
Labor Day may have marked the unofficial end of summer, but last week’s long weekend also marked the beginning of the publishing world’s fall book rush. With dozens of new titles hitting shelves in the months leading up to December’s holiday shopping spree, this is the season to celebrate books across all categories. Our highlights for fall’s upcoming releases are spread out across a variety of genres, assuring ample reading options for every literary preference.
Crime sure must have some allure. It’s driven untold numbers of men to mayhem, and a certain score of women to murder. And it’s caused some of our highest-minded literary scribes to take some very low roads. The latest egghead to get all hard-boiled is Robert Coover, who joins Thomas Pynchon, John Banville and Paul Auster in the back alleys of our mind. Okay, so Auster has basically been a hard-boiled egghead from the get; he just found a way to keep himself afloat above the low road. Pynchon and Banville (and now Coover) however all made a conscious decision to leave their airy heights and slum it. And the results are as beautiful and as memorable as a broken nose.
That’s good by the way. Damn good. Especially when you’re talking about pulp fiction. But surely these gentlemen haven’t gone surly simply because they feel like a dust-up. Or have they?
Most of us are familiar with the inevitable anxiety that comes with seeing a beloved book turned into a movie, but some stories can actually benefit from a little cross-media reinterpretation. Amid the medium’s own rapid ascension toward highbrow acceptance, the graphic novel has proved a flexible format for literary adaptation, transforming texts into improved visual narratives without eliminating the reading process.
This past week, a 1950s video of Vladimir Nabokov sipping tea, discussing Lolita with Lionel Trilling, and just generally being his charmingly elitist self made the rounds. It reminded us that author videos don’t have to resemble the BookTV cliche of someone just droning on and on. It also got us thinking: What else is out there today? After the jump, we collect our five favorite sites for author videos.
(which we previously 
— we recommend ten classic works that have been effectively translated into comic books.
