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
Zadie Smith
The Most Stylish People in Literature
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
Jonathan Lethem’s ‘Dissident Gardens’: In Praise of Authors Who Aren’t Afraid to Geek Out
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
The 50 Greatest Campus Novels Ever Written
No matter how old you are, the back-to-school season holds a certain kind of allure – be it nostalgia for scholarly tradition, the crisping of the days, a Pavlovian need to buy books, or just the satisfaction that you don’t have to be in class ever again. If you’re looking to indulge yourself without the schoolwork, you may take pleasure in another hallowed tradition: the campus novel. That is, books concerning the lives of students, professors, and miscellaneous academics, generally in or around a college. Here are 50 of the… Read More
Scenes From the Forthcoming East Coast-West Coast Literary War
What do the Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand have in common with a New Republic piece written by Marc Tracy? Hopefully nothing, but the title, “The L.A. Review of Books Declares War on the N.Y. Review of Books,” suggests that the piece could be the earliest document of a literary war between the coasts that will rival the Tupac and Biggie feud of the 1990s.
Since we at Flavorwire are peaceful East Coast citizens who love taking trips out to California without fearing any type of bodily harm, we present this timeline as a cautionary tale of what might happen if what Tracy perceives as aggression on the part of the scrappy upstart Los Angeles Review of Books against the venerable New York Review of Books escalates. … Read More
Tina Fey, David Foster Wallace, and Other Classic Portraits for The Believer by Charles Burns
Our country’s leading literary authorities are getting older. Are we at peace with that? Maybe it’s too early, but there’s a general agreement that as Lewis Lapham, founding editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, and Robert Silvers, founding editor of The New York Review of Books, grow older, the torch is being passed to younger editors, like the co-editors of n+1 and Dave Eggers and The Believer. The same might be said of their illustrators, specifically, that Charles Burns’s portraits for The Believer may some day be placed on equal standing with the dearly admired illustrations by David Levine for The New York Review. Some of our favorites, after the jump, are now on display at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York, alongside the Before & After drawings from Burns’s graphic novel Black Hole. … Read More
10 Great Contemporary Campus Novels: Proof the Genre Is Still Kicking
This week, we read an article over at the Guardian calling for the “retirement” of the campus novel, citing its apparent rite-of-passage status and prevalence, but sniffing, “the standard of the campus club’s productions, however, increasingly makes you wonder why they bother.” Well, we disagree. We love campus novels, and though the classics – Lucky Jim, Pnin — hold extra-special places in the bookshelf of our heart, we think contemporary versions are continuing the tradition in fine form. To prove our point, we’ve selected ten of our favorites, written in the last 20-odd years (our cutoff is 1990), that prove the genre is still relevant. Page through our picks after the jump, and let us know what you think of the modern campus novel in the comments. … Read More
The 25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time
This week marks the release of Aleksandar Hemon’s excellent book of personal essays, The Book of My Lives, which we loved, and which we’re convinced deserves a place in the literary canon. To that end, we were inspired to put together our list of the greatest essay collections of all time, from the classic to the contemporary, from the personal to the critical. In making our choices, we’ve steered away from posthumous omnibuses and multi-author compilations, and given what might be undue weight to our favorite writers (as one does). Click through to see our nominations for the 25 greatest essay collections of all… Read More
Judging 2012 Book Covers: US vs. UK
While paging through the Guardian‘s gallery of the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist earlier this week, we were struck by how different many of the nominees’ covers are from the American ones we know and (sometimes) love. Of course we knew this already, but we were newly inspired to take a look at some of 2012′s best books, and judge them by their covers, both at home and abroad. A disclaimer: your literary editor has little in the way of formal design education, but is instead approaching these as a voracious reader and picker-upper of pretty things in bookstores. … Read More
20 Highly Sexy Photos of Highbrow Authors [NSFW]
If you’re reading this, like as not you are one of those who thrilled at the shirtless photo of Mark Twain that has been recently making its rounds around the Internet. Here at Flavorpill, we were so — ahem — excited by the snapshot that we decided to round up a few other highly sexy photos of highbrow authors from the last two centuries. After all, authors posing in various states of undress is a trend that shows no signs of dying out — you’ll be able to get your paws on a whole calendar of “nearly nude” Canadian authors later in the year. Check out some scandalous writers after the jump — and since sexy is subjective, link us to any unbearably steamy author photos you’ve found in the comments. But casual readers be warned: there is full frontal male and female nudity in this post. … Read More
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