Following in the footsteps of the recent Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, the Coen Brothers’ cult movie The Big Lebowski has received the Shakespeare treatment.
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski
Seriously, Read This Book
Lev Grossman is ready to dub John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Blood-Horses and, more recently, Pulphead, “the next Tom Wolfe,” and NPR‘s Dan Kois agrees that he might be “the best magazine writer around.” Elsewhere, Zach Baron writes an interesting profile of the author for The Daily.
Slanting Light and Seedy Motels
“In noir, the problem is not an individual: the problem is the world.” Over at Electric Literature, Nicholas Seeley advocates for the efficacy of noir as a protest genre. Here’s a piece from The Millions’s Hannah Gersen that argues for Bartleby, The Scrivener as another surprising example of protest literature.
Worth Its Weight
What’s the value of a Nobel Prize? As of last week, at least $250,000.
August: Osage County Gets a Trailer
The first trailer has been released for the cinematic adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County. Here are two of my favorite scenes (one, two) from the play to whet your appetite. The film, which is directed by John Wells, is scheduled for a November release.
LMAOR
Andy Borowitz (of The Borowitz Report) picks five novels “that are enough to make anyone laugh.”
Cerebral Los Angelenos
Who says L.A. can’t be bookish? (Ok, I say that a lot.) But here to prove me (and you) wrong is next week’s calendar events for cerebral Los Angelenos. On the “books?”: Amiri Baraka, Joan Didion, and Jonathan Lethem, just to name a few.