The Millions recently posted the very Shteyngart-y opening passage of Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming novel, Super Sad True Love Story.

“Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off.”

It got us thinking about our own favorite beginnings, both recent and classic. Below are some favorites from our bookshelf. Feel free to add your own picks in the comments section.

1. Slumberland by Paul Beatty

Best commentary on “post-blackness” considering Obama wasn’t even president when the book was written:

“You would think they’d be used to me by now. I mean don’t they know that after fourteen hundred years the charade of blackness is over? That we blacks, the once eternally hip, the people who were as right now as Greenwich Mean Time, are, as of today, as yesterday as stone tools, the velocipede, and the paper straw all rolled into one? The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so.”

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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.

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John Gall, art director for Vintage International, was gifted the “most daunting project of [his] entire life”: redesigning all 21 book covers in the Vladimir Nabokov literary canon. Not an easy task. Gall rounded up an ace group of graphic designers to contribute to the project, from Pentagram partner Michael Beirut to Knopf heavy hitters Chip Kidd and Barbara de Wilde.

Because Nabokov was an avid butterfly collector, Gall assigned a design brief that proposed all the covers should resemble specimen boxes. Vintage and Anchor Books are currently hosting a giveaway of these art-meets-literature re-imaginings; we’ve listed our five favorites after the jump. Read More »

There has been a great deal of hand wringing over Dmitri Nabokov’s decision to publish his father’s unfinished novel The Original of Laura. Dmitri recognizes this by dedicating the book to “all the worldwide contributors of opinion, comment, and advice, of whatever its stripe, who imagined that their views, sometimes deftly expressed, might somehow change mine.” Poppa Vladimir made it perfectly clear to his wife that he wanted her to burn the manuscript if he died before finishing it, but she wavered and then died herself. The decision fell to Dmitri, who explains in the introduction that he feels that his father did not really want him to burn it. The obvious retort here is that he did want that, and said as much to his wife, explicitly. But dead men make no complaints, and Dmitri and Knopf have seen fit to publish a beautiful book from the messy little cards.

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The wait for Nabokov’s unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, is almost over (countdown to November 17th, people). The story, if you hadn’t heard, is that before his death the grand master ordered his son, Dmitri, to destroy the notecards on which he had been crafting his newest novel. Dmitri, after much struggle (both in the press and personally, we expect), has decided to publish the thing anyway, and we hear it’s true-to-form amazing.

If you’re really anxious (or just a fanboy), check out the awesome-sounding celebration of Nabokov’s work at the 92nd Street Y the day before Laura comes out. Martin Amis, Brian Boyd, and Chip Kidd will be there. Or while away the hours by starting in on our list of the most exciting unfinished novels, both classic and forthcoming.

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Today at Flavorpill, we re-watched the season finale of True Blood, complete with a laugh track. We listened to what Don Draper had to say about health care reform. We were excited for Betty White’s guest appearance on the upcoming season of 30 Rock. We were frightened by Nic Cage’s glam rock take on Superman. We read Nabakov’s new and improved version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. We met a mini-Glenn Beck, who looks like a huge dork. We wished that Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor had picked a more fortuitous name for his new indie label, Terrible Records. We learned about the birth of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” And finally, we said farewell to The Summer of Death (Credit: Alex Balk). It looks like we won this round of Battleship.

Bernard Schwartz directs the 92Y Poetry Center, and chief among his vocational duties is putting together 92Y’s legendary lineup of literary readings and events each year. Just as diehard Harry Potter fans lined up for midnight showings of Half-Blood Prince earlier this summer, 92Y tickets are coveted and eagerly awaited among lit nerds. This year’s agenda includes poet Charles Simic, novelist A.S. Byatt, Sam Shepard, John Irving, and other assorted writerly heavy-hitters.  Tickets go on sale today, August 3, and cost $10 for those age 35 and younger. After the jump, Bernard Schwartz recalls some of the center’s highlights, invokes a maritime metaphor, and tells us what we can expect this season. Read More »

Photographer Walker Evans began collecting picture postcards as a child, amassing 9,000 of them in his lifetime. A new book, written by Jeff Rosenheim and published by Steidl and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with an exhibition at the Met in NYC, now provide the opportunity to view a sampling of this collection, and to examine the importance it had in Evans’ vision of the world.
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Matthieson, Gordon-Reed win NBAs: National Book Awards were announced last night, and the honorees are Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Matthiessen. Gordon-Reed won in the nonfiction category for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, a biography of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves (including Sally, his rumored scandalous lover). Matthiesson is a second-time NBA winner (in 1979 he won for The Snow Leopard), bringing in the fiction prize for Shadow Country, based on the life of a 19^th-century farmer-cum-serial killer.

There was controversy over whether it should be elligible to compete as it’s a one-volume compilation of three novels that Matthiessen previously published. [NYT]

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