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Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo Wins the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction

By Emily Temple on

Yesterday, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced Don DeLillo as the recipient of the inaugural Library of Congress Prize… Read More

New York

35 New York Authors’ Favorite New York Authors

By Emily Temple on

We don’t know about you, but we’re always in the market for a new literary discovery. And when you’re on the hunt for a new book or a new writer to delve into, who better to ask than the folks who make their livings reading and writing themselves? With that in mind, we asked a few of the most important living New York authors to name-drop some of their favorite living New York authors — and what do you know? We have a few in common. After the jump, find out who 35 amazing NYC-based authors keep on their nightstands, and let us know your own favorite NYC writers in the comments. … Read More

New York

New York’s 100 Most Important Living Writers

By Flavorwire Staff on

Philip Roth’s recently announced retirement got us thinking about the state of New York City’s literary landscape. As a result, we’ve compiled a list of the city’s 100 most important… Read More

Books

15 Postcards from Famous Authors

By Emily Temple on

Summer may seem like the ideal postcard-writing season, what with cruises and camp, but we’ve always been most inspired to write them in the fall, when the leaves are changing and we’re feeling wistful. So to amp up that wistful feeling a bit — and since as you’ve probably noticed, we just can’t get enough of ogling literary ephemera — we went on the hunt for interesting postcards written by famous authors, from Jack Kerouac to Franz Kafka to Rainer Maria Rilke. Click through and admire the penmanship, doodles, and forceful words of a few of your favorite… Read More

Books

David Foster Wallace’s Formative Reading List

By Daniel Roberts on

The newly released big biography of David Foster Wallace, entitled Every Love Story is a Ghost Story and written by New Yorker scribe D.T. Max, gives a nitty-gritty look at Wallace as a troubled, tortured artist and human being. But DTM on DFW is also a primer on the growth of this particular writer — throughout the text we get mentions of the exact books Wallace read, and when, and how they formed his style. Here are just eight of them (one is a short story), along with the relevant excerpt from Max’s book. Follow along to become the next David Foster Wallace — or maybe just a little more well-read. … Read More

Books

Contemporary Authors as Adjectives

By Emily Temple on

Today marks the release of George Orwell’s Diaries, the influential writer’s personal writings from the years 1931 to 1949, published for the first time in the United States. Orwell is one of those writers who is so infused in our collective imagination and culture that his name has become its own adjective: “Orwellian” is used to describe a totalitarian government or situation similar to the one in 1984. Like Kafka, whose “Kafkaesque,” has come to mean not only “like Kafka’s writing” but also the more disconnected “marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity,” Orwell’s namesake will probably continue to evolve, becoming a term one understands even without reading a word of his writing. But what about more modern writers? After the jump, we’ve speculated on a few (tongue-in-cheek, mind you) definitions for the adjective-ized versions of contemporary authors — sure, some of their names don’t exactly lend themselves to common adjectival endings, but that’s okay. The English language is ever evolving. And in that spirit, we challenge you to play our game and make up your own in the comments! … Read More

Books

Bedside Book Snooping: Photos of Our To-Read Piles

By Emily Temple on

Everyone always wants to know what everyone else is reading, in our experience — if only to get some good ideas for ourselves. This month, in lieu of our periodical staff reading list, we decided to take a more visual (and slightly more voyeuristic) route, and asked Flavorpill staffers to snap a photo of their to-read piles — or whatever pile of books happened to be haunting them. Apparently as a group, we enjoy books with Big Important Questions for titles (we found more than one instance of both Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and the galley of Wilhelm Reich’s Where’s the Truth?), but other than that, we span the spectrum of messy and neat, paperback-crazed and hardcover-happy, with everything from design magazines to biographies to the hot, slim new fiction release sleeping next to our heads. Click through to snoop through the piles of books in a few of your devoted Flavorpill staffers’ bedrooms, and then let us know what you own bedside table looks like in the comments. … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. The good news: Claire Danes and her husband Hugh Dancy are expecting their first child. The even better news: It won’t affect the shooting schedule of Season 2 of Homeland. [via Vulture]

2. Apparently San Diego accidentally set off all of the fireworks in their Fourth of July display in just 15… Read More

Books

15 Famous Authors on Why They Write

By Alison Nastasi on

Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four author George Orwell’s 109th birthday just passed, and The Atlantic led us to an excerpt from the writer’s 1946 essay, Why I Write. The candid work reveals what Orwell believes are four explicit motives for writing. “They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living,” he mused. For Orwell, writers put pen to paper — or these days, fingers to keyboard — out of “sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.” The essay examines how these motives influenced his own work, then boldly concludes the following: “I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.”

We felt compelled to explore other reasons for writing as shared by famous authors. These honest and passionate declarations offer an intimate view into their processes, their life philosophies, and their humor. See if they inspire you, and then drop your personal favorites in the comments section below. … Read More

Books

10 Epidemically Overrated Books

By Emily Temple on

Last week, we read a fun article over at PWxyz entitled “We Fix the Top 100 Novels List,” wherein the Publisher’s Weekly staff sounded off on which novels they’d add to the Modern Library’s ubiquitous Top 100 — and which they’d take away. The article got us thinking about which novels we think are lauded entirely too much, whether by the press or the public at large. Now, keep in mind that this isn’t a list of bad books — it’s a list of good books that (to our minds) just seem to get more accolades than they deserve — and it is, and can only be, based on our humble opinion. Click through to read our list of terrifically, epidemically, perpetually overrated books, and add to (or subtract from) our picks in the comments. … Read More