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Zadie Smith

Pop Culture

11 Hilarious Women in Pop Culture (Who Aren’t Comedians)

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It’s a fact: women are funny. Comedians like Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, Amy Schumer, and the Broad City babes are making the world better with every weird joke that they make. But there’s also a strain of really awesome humor out there, coming from witty women working in (nominally) serious art forms. Whether it’s a laconic singer-songwriter who’s one-liner city or very serious writers who are writing for the very serious The New Yorker, there are all sorts of women whose work can use humor as a deadly weapon. Here’s a list of pop culture’s funniest women who aren’t professional jokesters, per se. … Read More

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Music

Gabriel García Márquez on Shakira and 5 Other Authors’ Fascinating Rock Star Profiles

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“The most amazing thing about the Shakira phenomenon is the craze that has gripped masses of children.” The late Gabriel García Márquez wrote that in his 2002 profile on Shakira for The Guardian. Even when covering one of the biggest pop stars in the world, the Nobel Prize winner’s music writing doesn’t rank anywhere near his classics like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, but it does earn a spot alongside a few of our other favorite rock star/writer pairings. … Read More

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Books

Listen to 15 Literary Icons Reading Their Own Work

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One of the most important experiences you can have with your favorite author is to hear them read aloud from their works. But many of us will never get the chance to see our most beloved writer in the flesh. So, after the jump is a collection of 15 writers — some alive, some long gone — reading their own words (all fiction, with the exception of William Faulkner, whose Nobel Prize speech is included because it’s now often taught alongside his novels and stories, and Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking).  … Read More

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Books

10 Authors on James Joyce

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Happy birthday to literature’s modernist master, James Joyce. Writers are still finding devastatingly beautiful ways to describe the impact that the Ulysses author continues to have on their work, paying homage to one of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century. Here are ten authors on the Irish novelist’s work, life, and enduring influence. … Read More

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Celebrity

What 10 of Your Favorite Cultural Icons Were Up To in College

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Thanks to BuzzFeed’s entertaining roundup, we’ve discovered Mindy Kaling’s college comic strip, Badly Drawn Girl. A shrewd look at the facts of coed life, from frat bros to dining hall food, it’s a peek at what Kaling’s comic sensibilities were like long before she wound up in The Office‘s writers’ room. Other cultural notables have had their fair share of cool college projects, too. We took the liberty of looking up what some of our favorite famous people were up to while they were still living in dorm rooms. … Read More

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Books

Literary Snobs: A Ranked Taxonomy

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2013 is going out with a bang of literary snobbishness. The latest round comes via John Gallagher at The New Republic, railing against “Hollywood DFW” and the “terrible, terrible idea” of Jason Segel portraying the late David Foster Wallace in a film adaptation of David Lipsky’s Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. He just can’t imagine such a thing as Saint Wallace being portrayed on screen, especially by an actor mostly known for his comedic roles. How dare they get an funnyman to commit this act of literary sacrilege! Exposing people to Wallace’s work who might have otherwise never known about it? Seriously, just who do they think they are? … Read More

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Books

50 Books That Define the Past Five Years in Literature

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Five years ago this month saw the publication of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 in English. The book topped almost every year-end list and signaled a shift in literary tastes, creating larger audiences for works in translation, historical storylines, and narrative complexity. Between the uncertain future of the publishing industry, the rise of indie presses, new literary magazines, and the Internet and ereaders, the years that followed were bittersweet for the book industry but also a unique and fruitful time for readers. The following 50 books provide several clues as to why that is, and also give a glimpse into the future of… Read More

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Books

The Most Stylish People in Literature

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Another New York Fashion Week is in the books after today. There were some highs, and there were some definite lows. Lots of pictures of celebrities looking bored while models walked past them were taken, and people tweeted things like this: … Read More

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Books

Jonathan Lethem’s ‘Dissident Gardens’: In Praise of Authors Who Aren’t Afraid to Geek Out

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When I tell people that Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, Dissident Gardens, is the author’s most accessible work, I tend to walk away from the conversation thinking I did the person I was talking to, and the author, a disservice. The book isn’t less engaging or a step down from his previous works; what I mean is that Dissident Gardens is Lethem’s easiest novel to follow, and far less genre- and culture reference-dependent than past novels like Chronic City (science fiction) and Motherless Brooklyn (postmodern detective novel). … Read More

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