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Sloane Crosley

Books

Required Reading: 10 Women Writers We Love

By Megan Collins on

The recent showdown between Jezebel and The Daily Show got us thinking about our own favorite writers of the fairer sex. To show our support, we thought we’d give a shout-out to the female writers who currently have us crushing, wordsmith-style. We kept things simple, sticking to living authors only (sorry Louisa May Alcott), and in no way mean for this to be a definitive list of the “best” women writers. After the jump, our top picks for the lovely ladies who leave us weak at the literary knees. And of course, let us know in the comments if we’ve missed your object of authorly affection. … Read More

Books

10 Beach Books For Smarty Pants Readers

By Bailey Kennedy on

During the summertime most people opt for mindless, easy-to-read books to page through while sunning themselves on the sand. Not exactly the John Grisham or Sophie Kinsella type? Uphold your brainy reputation and choose from the mix of newish releases we’ve pulled together for the benefit of beach blanket bookworms everywhere! … Read More

Books

Flavorpill Book Club: Sloane Crosley’s How Did You Get This Number

By Caroline Stanley on

Welcome to the first edition of the Flavorpill Book Club. Why are we launching a book club? Because we’re an office full of huge readers always looking for recommendations, and we’ve noticed that most of you guys are too. Why did we choose Sloane Crosley’s second collection of humorous personal essays, How Did You Get This Number, as our first selection? Because three of our editors happened to be reading it at the same time — and they all loved it. When does that happen?

So here’s how this is going to work: Click through to read more about why this is the book all of your friends will be talking about this summer. Go out and buy a copy of the book. Read it. If you’ve got a question for Sloane, leave it as a comment here or send an email to tips [at] flavorpill [dot] com. (We’d also like to hear what you think about our selection.) We’ll be emailing her our favorite questions at the end of the month, and featuring her responses, along with any choice bits of commentary from you guys, in a followup post. … Read More

Books

Your Favorite Author’s Life Story in Just Six Words

By Caroline Stanley on

Here’s a challenge: Can you identify some of contemporary literature’s most famous voices from just six words of their life story? We’ve pulled some of our favorite pithy memoirs from It All Changed in an Instant (SMITH Magazine’s new sequel to Not Quite What I Was Planning), and blacked out the attribution to make things interesting. If you’re feeling stumped, don’t feel bad (and look at the tags on this post for hints), some of them are deceptively simple.

So would you believe me anyway? – James Frey

Heart fattens, skin thins. Who knew? – Sloane Crosley … Read More

Books

Thurber Humor Prize Nominees Are In: Professor Happycat Spurned, Sloane Crosley Over the Moon

By Heather Schwedel on

There are infinite LOLs to be had on the internet, but only one book each year can win the Thurber Prize for American Humor. The contenders for an award that has in the past gone to David Sedaris and Jon Stewart this year include Sloane Crosley, Ian Frazier, Don Lee and Laurie Notaro. Among the unrecognized: the prevailing internet trend of LOLCats, which was translated into last year’s paperback I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun. Instead, this year’s nominations went to three essay collections and a novel. How did Crosley, nominated for I Was Told There’d Be Cake, take the news? She told… Read More

Books

Watch Before Reading: Art-House Book Trailers

By Sabrina Jaszi on

Usually just one to three minutes long, the best book trailers swiftly inform potential readers of what to expect. But unlike most movie previews, these trailers are often interpretive, rather than plot-focused; they spring from the imagination of their creators, as well as from the books they represent. Search YouTube and you’ll find thousands of examples. … Read More

Books

Quote of the Day: No One Told Her There’d Be Blackouts

By Caroline Stanley on

“If there’s one thing for which I have zero tolerance, it’s the smell of Lay’s potato chips. You’d have more luck waking me up by wafting the smell of those processed starch discs beneath my nose than you would with smelling salts and 100-year-old ether. Which is too bad for Lay’s potato chips, because it’s… Read More

Books

Chuck Klosterman on the Big Screen and Other Non-Fiction Classics We’d Like to See as Movies

By Fernanda Diaz on

When we heard that Chuck Klosterman’s road-trip memoir Killing Yourself To Live would be coming to the big screen soon, we were careful not to get too excited. Sure, some of our favorite journalist narratives have been successfully adapted into masterpieces, like Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, which became Adaptation, or even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But others, like this year’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, get Hollywood-ized with characters that never existed and none of the first-person drivel we liked about them in the first place.

Which brings us back to Klosterman — he’s no Hunter S. Tompson, but his account of his magical music mystery tour is complicated and dark, and we’d hate to see it transformed into a crappy buddy-road-trip comedy.

After the jump, we make casting suggestions for Killing Yourself to Live and suggest other non-fiction classics we’d like to see turned into good movies. … Read More

Books

FW Exclusive: Sloane Crosley Told Us There’d Be Author Recommendations

By Caroline Stanley on

It was a trading places moment book publicist SLOANE CROSLEY became a New York media darling last fall. With the release of her first book of personal essays, I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE, people went a little nuts for all things Sloane — including us after we spotted the Diorama Diaries section on her Web site.

It was like a budget, DIY-version of our childhood dollhouse, but much more thoughtful and intricate. Paper clip hangers! We spent hours studying those images and chuckling to ourselves. We wanted to play with them in real life. We wanted to make some that featured scenes from our lives!

To put it politely, we were a tad obsessed. Reading Sloane’s book made her feel like one of our good friends; and those are the people who we usually bug for good book recommendations. That’s why we’ve asked her to give us the names a few of her favorite essayists.

Sloane’s picks after the jump. … Read More