Yesterday marked the release of Miranda July’s newest book, It Chooses You, a quirky piece loosely tied to her newest film, The Future, which will be released on DVD November 29th. July’s style and persona has been the subject of much debate — people usually either love or hate the precious, semi-ironic, self-aware sweetness that we have come to call “twee,” and of which July is one of the most prominent contemporary examples. The reemergence of the pixie princess of literature inspired us to consider a few other authors whose work can veer into the impossibly twee. Now, don’t get us wrong — we’re not saying that twee-ness is an inherently bad thing. In fact, several of the authors on this list number among our all-time favorites in any genre, and we happen to be on team July, at least most of the time. Click through to check out our list of twee authors, or at least authors who write twee books sometimes, in between setting up tea parties for their kittens, who are all wearing argyle socks, and let us know which of them tickle your fancy in the comments. Read More »
It’s official: we’ve found our new favorite blog. Bill Ryan, a New York based book lover, is collecting insults from his literary heroes. It all started around six years ago at a book signing at the excellent BookCourt, when on a whim, Ryan asked Maggie Pouncey to inscribe his book with an insult instead of a dedication. Now, in his wonderfully entertaining blog, Insulted By Authors, Ryan documents his adventures getting insulted by – or not getting insulted by, as the case may be – his favorite authors, and displays the creatively rude missives for our enjoyment. Click through for some of our favorite insults from Ryan’s collection, but be warned – these are word people, and some of their language is quite colorful. Perhaps it is redundant to say, but the faint of heart should not read Amy Sedaris’s contribution.
Salon asked 18 authors — including Dave Eggers, James Frey, Tao Lin, and Laura Hillenbrand — to name the book they enjoyed most this year and used the results to create a fantastic slideshow. But don’t read it yet! We’ve got a little quiz for you first. See if you can match each author on the list with his or her favorite read of 2010. Highlight the blacked-out boxes under the book titles to check your answers.
1. What do you think of Tao Lin’s near-exact replication of Jonathan Franzen’s Time cover for The Stranger? Is it parody or homage? [via Thought Catalog]
2. Kick-Ass star Chloe Moretz will play cult icon Emily The Strange in an upcoming film adaptation of the Dark Horse comic. [via Deadline]
3. Exciting news for former English majors: Carson McCullers, author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, is getting the biopic treatment. [via Variety]
4. Watch Betty White rap with Donald Glover and Danny Pudi on last night’s season premiere of Community. [via Vulture]
5. During the ’90s, Jon Hamm had a brief stint in the porn industry. But before you get way too excited, we should tell you that he was only a set dresser. [via E!]
For those of you who may have managed to miss the piles recent of articles about him, Tao Lin has just released a new novel called Richard Yates and starring characters named Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment. Today, Hipster Runoff (a.k.a. the site many suspect Lin actually runs) has excerpted a passage that contains the sentence, “I just want to walk around with you at night and sometimes ass and crotch rape you.” If that doesn’t sell you, seeing as Tao Lin is all about the knowing cultural references (see also: the novel’s title), we thought this list of proper nouns in the except might help you decide whether you’d like to purchase Richard Yates. We’ve also included a handy word cloud for visual learners.
OK, so we’re launching a new weekly feature. It’s called Hipster Headlines, and the idea is pretty self-explanatory. We’ll round up the most interesting hipster-related stories of the week and leave you to do with them what you will. Play along after the jump, or, if you hate the term and all things associated, head over to Gawker, where they’re voting for a new word to replace it. Which, come to think of it, will make finding these stories a lot harder for us…
Jim is alive. Paul is dead. Andrew W.K. is really Dave Grohl. Wait — one of these doesn’t belong. It seems that pop culture conspiracies have been around since the dawn of time, or at least since the second gunman and the grassy knoll. However, some bizarre mysteries are better known than others. In this recent examination of hard rocker Andrew W.K., Gawker debunks the myth that the “Party Hard” singer may be Dave Grohl, or someone named Steev Mike, or, since 2005, someone else entirely. Meanwhile, he just lost some weight and shaved, people.
In the tradition of strange pop culture conspiracies, we offer five more to ponder as you wonder whether we ever really visited the moon.
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).
It’s not enough to just be awesome at one thing anymore. More and more artists are multitasking, and we’re seeing a particular amount of crossover between the somewhat unlikely genres of music and literature. But wait — aren’t musicians supposed to be outgoing egomaniacs and aren’t writers supposed to be tweedy shut-ins? Well, the writer/musician isn’t exactly a new trend — remember Tarantula, Dylan’s stream-of-consciousness book of prose-poetry? And don’t forget that Leonard Cohen was actually a writer first. So maybe there’s something to this whole writer turned rock star thing. Here are some multitaskers who make us feel bad about ourselves when we lie around the house all Sunday.
