What would the child of The Big Lebowski characters The Dude (Jeff Bridges) and Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) look like? Maybe like Lt. Col. Django (Bridges, again), one of the characters in Grant Heslov‘s The Men Who Stare at Goats, set to release in November, a comedy about the U.S. military’s attempt to train psychic soldiers (based on the book by Jon Ronson).
The Men Who Stare at Goats
CJ Hauser on Gothic Literature’s Life Lessons
How can you avoid the second Mrs. de Winter's fate? By allowing the past and present to coexist.
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Doc Brown: Hippie?
Back to the Future II originally featured a very different Doc Brown from the one that made the final cut. Behold Doc’s 1967 alias, his hippie parents, and his apparent affinity for motorcycles in this 147-page script (PDF) that was later re-purposed into the movie we know today. (The Bizarro Doc action picks up around page 90.)
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The Ghost of Playboy’s Literary Past
“We editors told ourselves the naked women were merely carnival barkers: they got an audience into the tent, but we kept them with the content.” In the Guardian, Playboy‘s former fiction editor Amy Grace Loyd reveals what it was like to work at the magazine and how she commissioned work from writers like Donna Tartt, Margaret Atwood, and Junot Díaz. Read our review of Loyd’s debut novel, The Affairs of Others.
Graphomania
“I’m a total database nerd. In college I worked as a troubleshooter for a database of medical research, trying to predict and prevent mistakes in the data entry process to avoid screwing up the records. Is anything more satisfying than a successfully written query delivering precisely the required results? It’s so much more direct than writing fiction. A query either works or it doesn’t.” Steve Himmer’s Nervous Breakdown self-interview.
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2011 PEN/Malamud Winner
Edith Pearlman takes the 2011 PEN/Malamud award in recognition of her short stories. Her most recent collection, her fourth, is Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories.
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RIP Mall Bookstores
Mourning the death of the Waldenbooks at the mall. “But in a way I’m glad, as this means that yet another supposed agent of publishing’s ever-imminent death is now biting the dust itself.”