“Inherent Vice . . . is like a novelization of Grand Theft Auto, claims Nerd World. And hey, they’ve got ten points of comparison to back it up, so you know it must be true. (via)
Thomas Pynchon: The Video Game
Paperback Swap
Paperback Swap lets you can swap your books with other community members.
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As Good as Gold
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient won the Golden Man Booker Prize, the one-off award celebrating the best work of fiction from the last five decades of the prize. About the prize, Ondaatje said “I wish in fact that those of us on this Man Booker list had been invited to propose and speak about what we felt were the overlooked classics—in order to enlarge what ought to be read, as opposed to relying on the usual suspects.” Read the rest of his illuminating and gracious speech over at Literary Hub.
On Violence
“They couldn’t testify because they were dead so I wanted to lend my own body and voice to them.” Han Kang on writing about the Gwangju massacre and her slim novels, Human Acts and The Vegetarian.
Let Us Praise James Agee
“Every sense cleared about three hundred percent and stood up on its hind legs waving its feelers.” Eighty years ago, James Agee got an assignment that entered him into history, though not during his lifetime. Let us now celebrate Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. See also: our essay on famous artist-writer collaborations, like Agee’s with Walker Evans.
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The Internet v. Writing
It’s hard to write when the internet beckons. So has said Dani Shapiro and our own Emily St. John Mandel. Colson Whitehead doesn’t necessarily agree, however. Ditto for our own Kevin Hartnett. Now the folks at Electric Literature have thrown in their two cents.
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