For those who like their celebrity fashion with a voluptuous lashing of satire, this Fug’s for you. Check out the maybe-not-so-pretty fashion blog Go Fug Yourself‘s Grammy Awards coverage–or lack of coverage, as was (quelle suprise!) the case with Britney Spears.
Fug Life
Details are vague
China Miéville on apocalyptic London for The New York Times Magazine: "Standing so straight on a raised dais, in so immaculate a uniform that he looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Metropolitan Police Service’s new commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, tells the conference in an avuncular voice about his plan for 'total policing. ' He is enthusiastic but nebulous. Details are vague."
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Twitter Fiction Festival
On Friday Twitter announced their new Twitter Fiction Festival, a “virtual storytelling celebration.” The festival will feature “creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world,” and you can submit story proposals over here.
And Now for Some Humor
In which Dr. Indiana Jones is regrettably denied tenure because "his timeliness in grading and returning assignments was a concern."
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The Literary Identity
“Being someone who’s an outsider, there are so many ways in which the world acts on you or assigns narratives to you.” Literary Hub interviews author Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi about literature, identity, and her new novel, Call Me Zebra. From our archives: Nur Nasreen Ibrahim's review of Call Me Zebra.
Longstanding Controversy
Nowadays, Huck Finn is as a lightning rod for racial issues, which explains why so many schools have banned the book over the years. But in the late 18th century, when Mark Twain published it, the novel was more controversial as a critique of childhood in America. In the Times, Year in Reading alum Parul Sehgal reads Huck Finn’s America, a new book by Andrew Levy that sheds light on the context of the era. You could also read our founder C. Max Magee on reading Huck Finn as a child.
Race, Decolonial Love, and Junot Díaz
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Curiosities: Cartoon Batting Averages
Colson Whitehead says "Wow, Fiction Works!"The LA Times has a clip from the movie version of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, directed by The Office star John Krasinski. (via)Carolyn writes about the real-life connection between Walker Percy and Bruce Springsteen.The Village Voice shows off the final results of its highly scientific system of determining New Yorker cartoonists' batting averages.Cambridge Information Group, which owns Bowker, AquaBrowser, ProQuest, Serials Solutions and RefWorks makes an investment in LibraryThing.Vote in The 2009 Tournament of Books Zombie Poll.A book that has turned out to be so wrong it has become a collectors item (check out the prices): The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy