“Dear Marlon, I’m praying that you’ll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it….You play Dean and I’ll play Sal… I’ll show you how Dean acts in real life, you couldnt possibly imagine it without seeing a good imitation…” From a letter from Jack Kerouac to Marlon Brando. (via The Rumpus)
From Kerouac to Brando
Pride, Prejudice, and Neopets
When YA author Jordan Ifueko was 10, she brought her two passions, Neopets and Jane Austen, together in a popular fan-fiction tale, "Pride, Prose, and Princes."
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Tuesday New Release Day: Cole; Russell; Coover; Grossman; Long; Thompson; Pirzad
Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief is out this week, as is Karen Russell’s e-book novella Sleep Donation. Also out: The Brunist Day of Wrath by Robert Coover; Falling Out of Time by David Grossman; Bad Teeth by Dustin Long; The Land of Steady Habits by Ted Thompson; and The Space Between Us by Zoya Pirzad.
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Football Book Club: Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’
This week, Football Book Club is taking it to the next level: They’re reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and posting about Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half. If you’re keeping score at home, that means this week is All Brosh, All the Time. Also, as per usual, they will not be watching the NFL and not liking it one bit.
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Autism as a Literary Device
Susan Sontag once wrote that the truest way to portray illness was without metaphor. Our own Marie Myung-Ok Lee takes a look at autism in recent literature and the ways its writers (ranging from Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, and Louise Erdrich) have often reduced those with autism to a literary construct.
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Dead Men May Tell Tales
“The eradication of Terry Pratchett’s unfinished works, the zeros and ones of his hard drive ground into the earth at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, is an imaginative exception to the rule.” The Paris Review questions how we publish an authors posthumous works and whether there’s a better way to do so. Pair with: our 2017 Select Literary Obituaries.
For Science!
Celebrate of the recent discovery of the Higgs boson with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s list of science fiction stories based on “more or less accurate science” and the recently uploaded sci-fi themed New Yorker fiction podcast.
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