While you’re waiting to get your hands on Lord of Misrule, the National Book Award winner by Jaimy Gordon, Gargoyle Magazine posts an interview with Gordon from 1983. (via The Paris Review).
Vintage Interview with Jaimy Gordon
Football Book Club: ‘Milk and Filth’
This week the Band of Merry Men/Women that is of Football Book Club is reading Carmen Giménez Smith’s poetry collection Milk and Filth — and posting about Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction. Also: Check in later this week for possible guest posts by Ben Carson and Donald Trump. Also: There will be no guest posts by Ben Carson and Donald Trump.
Ontological Studies of Swedish Furniture
Most readers nurse particular fantasies of stepping into their favorite books. Whether they dream of enrolling at Hogwarts, or signing up for MI6 with James Bond, they usually have a stable of settings that function as a means of escape. So imagine how strange and conflicting it was to be Jonathan Gottschall, the English professor who got a chance to enter Fight Club.
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Always Watching
Neurotic writers or friends-of-writers are likely to have asked themselves an uncomfortable question: do the writers I know use my foibles for material? At The New Statesman, Oliver Farry lists a number of proofs that they do, citing Dante’s Inferno, Madame Bovary and Beckett’s debut novel Murphy.
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American Experience: Jesse Owens
The Summer Olympics begin in exactly one month, so I recommend checking out this 52-minute American Experience episode on Olympic legend Jesse Owens to set the tone.
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What Happens at Pogofest Stays at Pogofest
“Wasn’t Pogofest the type of idea barely solvent towns pay marketing consultants millions of dollars to avoid? Who was Pogofest supposed to appeal to, besides—thirty years after the fact—me? I pose the question to Janice Parks, a former city commissioner. ‘Well, look what a rat did for the wasteland of Central California,’ she says.” A bizarre, slightly surreal look at Waycross, Georgia — the self-proclaimed hometown of Pogo Possum.
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Oh, Edward!
Oh, those poor little Twilight-addled tweens–as if they weren’t already goggly-eyed with quasi-chaste adoration of Edward Cullen, hero of Stephenie Meyer‘s Twilight books. How they will melt when they see this utterly shameless New Moon poster that portrays a melancholic Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in a state of tasteful-ish dishabille.
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