One of our go-to Monday morning reads (seriously, bookmark it) is The Days of Yore, a stellar blog that interviews artists of all stripes about the time before they were successful. It is consistently inspiring, thoughtful and flat-out wonderful to read – and whether you’re an aspiring artist, writer, musician or some combination thereof, there will be someone to give you some pithy life advice. When one of our very favorite authors, Jennifer Egan, won the Pulitzer this week for her mind-blowing novel A Visit From The Goon Squad, we were thrilled to see her Days of Yore interview go up soon after, and it got us thinking about all the great life advice from amazing authors just dangling out there in the universe, waiting to be collected. Click through for some curated advice and musings from Jennifer Egan, George Saunders, Gary Shteyngart, Wells Tower, and well, you know, anyone who’s anyone, and if you get inspired, be sure to click over to the whole interview.
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Now that it’s the end of the year, there are a million suggested reading lists out there — including a few from us. So with such an overwhelming array of choices, how’s an aspiring literary hipster to know which books are most important in terms of general knowing-it-all-ness? Like last year, we decided to go straight to the source, and to that end, we’ve collected a few of our favorite and most knowledgeable lit-hipsters’ own hit lists for your cred-building convenience. Click through and enjoy!
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We were first introduced to the work of Nick Flynn after he was recommended to us by his friend and fellow writer, Stephen Elliott. After devouring his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, we were excited when his latest, The Ticking Is the Bomb, landed our on desk earlier this year. While Bullshit tackles the subject of Flynn’s childhood in Boston and his relationship with his father (who just happened to wander into the homeless shelter where he’d been working one night), Ticking is a much different story, focusing instead on his daughter’s impending birth and America’s obsession with torture. The former has been optioned as a film that will be directed by Paul Weitz and star Casey Affleck and Robert DeNiro.
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Katie Roiphe’s recent essay in the New York Times entitled “The Naked and the Conflicted” calls out contemporary authors for being prude snugglers, and praises mid-century males for being pervy sex fiends. The article, complete with handy graphs, decries the current generation of literary greats as too obsessed with irony and ambivalence to let its characters (or themselves, she hints somewhat heavily) enjoy sex or their own virility. Citing David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Franzen, and Michael Chabon, among others, she writes:
The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé.
Now wait just one minute.
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There are a million suggested reading lists out there, especially now that it’s the end of the year/decade/life as we know it. So how’s an aspiring literary hipster to know which books are most important in terms of street cred and general knowing-it-all-ness? We decided to go straight to the source, and to that end, we’ve collected a few of our favorite and most knowledgeable lit-hipsters’ own hit lists for your cred-building convenience.
Most of the books and stories suggested here are completely awesome, and we’re pretty confident that these people know what they’re talking about (most of them create some not-too-shabby literature themselves), so we suggest that the anti-hipsters among you might do well to read on too. After all, we mean hipster in the good way (this time).
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Today at Flavorpill, we looked at dead birds killed by our trash. We listened to A-TRAK remix the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. We followed the Shepard Fairey drama. We met 50 visionaries. We had a Nintendo flashback. We realized that there’s a Republican rep for almost anything bad. We planned our fall foliage tour. We wondered when the strollers will descend on Williamsburg (and wished that Stephen Elliott had invited us to his pasting party!). We were excited about a public-funded, crowdsourced animated feature film from Aardman and the Tate. And finally, we wished that Jonathan Ames had come over to our house to watch the fake Jonathan Ames on Bored to Death. What a good story that would be.
Stephen Elliott’s new book The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder
expertly weaves together the story of the author’s writer’s block (a byproduct of his relationship with his abusive father) with the trial of Hans Reiser — a computer programmer accused of murdering his wife, Nina. The linchpin: Sean Sturgeon, Hans’ former best friend, Nina’s former lover, and a former member of San Francisco’s underground S&M scene. Now a born-again Christian, he claims to have committed eight and a half murders. Could this be one of them? Read More »
Keeping up with the Jobses is a struggle for the publishing industry, this we know. This fall, three new releases coming to a bookstore near you are sounding a battle cry for the antiquarian hardcover book. The twist? Their cover designs are imprinted directly on the board binding the book, meaning no fussy dust jacket and heightened tactile pleasure. (Tactile not currently available in the iPhone apps store.) Read More »
