All you struggling artists and writers out there, take heart. It may seem like you’re just spinning your wheels at that random job you got walking dogs/painting fences/selling umbrellas on the corner, but you could find your inspiration for the Next Great American Novel at any moment. Or, think of it this way: one day you’ll get to talk about whatever you’re doing now as a charming aside in interviews with the New York Times. After all, from pirating to condom sales to modeling, many of the most famous authors in American history had a few pretty weird day jobs to pay the bills before they hit the big time, and we don’t know about you, but we find that to be a comforting thought. Click through to see some of the strangest day jobs of beloved authors before they were famous, and then get back to work.
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.
While it doesn’t exactly make for light lunchtime reading, the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) has published a list of this year’s National Magazine Awards finalists, and we were happy to see that it includes some of our favorite writers, including Wells Tower, Christopher Hitchens, and Jerry Saltz. The New Yorker received the most nominations (nine!), followed by New York, The New York Times Magazine, and Virginia Quarterly Review, which all received six nods a piece. The winners will be announced at a dinner on May 9th, where the perennially dapper Tom Wolfe will be presented with the Creative Excellence Award for being “one of the most influential magazine journalists of our time.” Click through to peruse a list of the nominees in the public interest, reporting, feature writing, profile writing, and essays and criticism categories, including links to the articles and essays that are available online.
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.
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but can you judge a country by the kind of covers it puts on its books? We’ve always found the cover changes between US and UK editions of the same books pretty interesting – they must be reflective of our different cultures in some way incomprehensible to us. After all, book jacket designers are trying to capture the attention and imagination of their target populace, so it’s fascinating to see what the experts think will attract a Brit versus what they think might attract an American. Inspired by the annual US vs UK book cover comparison of Rooster contenders over at The Millions, we decided to make a list of our own, comparing the covers of our favorite books from last year — and, just for fun, a few of our favorite books from years past. Click through to see the comparisons and our picks for the winners, and let us know what you think in the comments!
As recently as a year or two ago, the phrase “book trailer” conjured images of a library in a double-wide. But now the trailer is an essential part of book buzz-building, and Melville House Publishing has recognized this by organizing The 1st Annual Moby Awards to celebrate the best and worst of the medium. Publisher and award organizer Dennis Loy Johnson explains, “For a long time, Big Publishing has been wishing it was either the movie industry or the music industry — first writers needed agents, then they had to be young and beautiful, now they need to be in actual movies. It just all cried out for a spoof.”
Today at Flavorpill, we were excited as new details emerged about Michael Moore’s upcoming flick, Capitalism: A Love Story. We examined the many faces of Arnold. We wondered what Wells Tower’s new representation means for his writing career. We found it interesting that even hip-hop’s “cash kings” are taking a 40% hit in this bad economy. We were excited for Napoleon Dynamite’s new Comedy Central series, which is being written by Will Ferrell. We found it funny that this Wall Street analyst had to apologize for being wrong about the box office potential of Pixar’s Up. And finally, we felt bad for Lita Ford, one bandmember who’s having nothing to do with the upcoming Runaways biopic; Joan Jett’s manager allegedly offered to buy the rights to her life story for $1,000.
A few weeks back, we decided the time had come to take the Kindle out in public. We hadn’t seen any out there in the world yet, but damned if we were going to relegate it to the coffee table and keep dragging hardcovers around in the old shoulder bag. The only problem with this is that the Kindle, in this early-adoption stage, invites interruptions from strangers. “What is that?” “I’ve never seen one of those before.” “What are you doing?” Read More »
