At McSweeney’s, Shakespearean letters to Santa.
Santa, my Liege
The Immortal Book
Not-so-breaking news: Books are the best way to store information. CDs, flash memory, hard drives, and other digital storage devices aren't nearly as durable as good old fashioned paper. So the next time someone says you have too many books, just say it's your attempt at immortality.
Critterati
Happy Halloween! At the New Yorker, the winners of the dress your pet as a literary character contest. Don't miss the honorable mentions (I'm partial to the feline Moby Dick).
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A Rush of Blood to the Head?
An intriguing pairing: Norman Rush tackles James Ellroy's Blood's A Rover in the current New York Review of Books.
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#LitBeat: NYC <3’s The Rumpus back!
Last night Colson Whitehead, Sam Lipsyte, Amber Tamblyn, and Andrew McCarthy read to some New Yorkers at Public Assembly, simply because practically everyone likes The Rumpus. Here's Specter Magazine's editor, Mensah Demary, with the latest installment of #LitBeat.
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Oh, Tom Drury, how I love thee.
If you're a fan of Tom Drury (and if you aren't--what's wrong with you?), you'll be excited to know that the new short film based on his short story "Path Lights" is now online at the David Lynch Foundation. The film was directed by Zachary Sluser, and stars John Hawkes.
An Interview with Jaimy Gordon
“I’ve spent my whole professional life swirling the eddies of the margins… What I want right now is to see my book in an airport. Then in a couple of years everyone will figure out that I’m too esoteric, and I’ll be back…" The New York Times posts a curious interview with the unconventional Jaimy Gordon, winner of this year's National Book Award.
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Reading a Video Game
The modern maestros of fantasy at Bethesda Softworks penned thousands of pages of text for the Elder Scrolls series, scattering 256 detail-packed, in-game books across 2006’s Oblivion, with a commensurate amount in 2002’s Morrowind. Presumably these tomes were consumed by the hardcore few. Did Bethesda spend countless hours of careful word-crafting for a fanatical minority?
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