Checkerboard Films has produced a new documentary film on James Salter, “James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime.” You can see Nick Antosca and myself, waxing admiringly, as the “young literary voices” who’ve been influenced by Salter.
New Documentary on James Salter
Tuesday New Release Day: Pynchon, Baker, McNair, Boccaccio
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge, which we covered in several Curiosities, is out this week. Also out: Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker; Pickett’s Charge by Charles McNair; and a new translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron by UT-Austin professor Wayne Rebhorn. (For more on these and other upcoming titles, check out our Great 2013 Second-half Book Preview.)
The Casual Vacancy Adaptation
Although we won’t see Hogwarts on screen again, another J.K. Rowling fictional world will be on your TV soon. HBO and BBC are adapting her novel The Casual Vacancy into a three-hour miniseries.
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Brad Listi Finally Gets Interviewed
The NY Daily News sat Other People Podcast‘s Brad Listi down for an interview, and thus answers the question of “who interviews the interviewers.”
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Adorkable
“Our Aesthetic Categories, though, argues on behalf of aesthetic experiences that aren’t quite so awe-inspiring or rare. Sitting before your computers or walking the streets of your town, you don’t encounter beautiful things as frequently as you do interesting, momentarily arresting ones—and as for the sublime, when was the last time you experienced catharsis? Instead, [Sianne] Ngai considers our ‘minor’ aesthetic experiences, the ones that make up our day.” In the era of adorkable and nerd chic, Slate looks at Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.
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Parting Is Blah Blah Blah
Say goodbye to Sadie Stein! Stein, who is moving on after two years as The Paris Review Daily’s correspondent, had this to say: “It is a strange thing to monetize your emotions. Anyone who writes or creates knows this. And the work one does on the Internet feels insubstantial, even by the flimsy standards of intellectual property. Any body of digital work is a funny mixture of ephemeral and immortal, and it’s hard to know how to feel about such an archive.”
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Choose Your Own Adventure Real Talk
For the most part, the scariest thing you can do in a choose your own adventure book is choose to enter a cave. At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg shows us what choose your own adventure would’ve looked like if it were historically accurate. “It is daytime. Turn to page 19. Page 19: You have died in childbirth.”
Page 19: You have died in childbirth
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/23/choose-adventure-human-history/#crEV03DC0ezuzuuz.99
It is daytime. Turn to page 19.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/23/choose-adventure-human-history/#crEV03DC0ezuzuuz.99
It is daytime. Turn to page 19.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/23/choose-adventure-human-history/#crEV03DC0ezuzuuz.99
It is daytime. Turn to page 19.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/23/choose-adventure-human-history/#crEV03DC0ezuzuuz.99
It is daytime. Turn to page 19.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/23/choose-adventure-human-history/#crEV03DC0ezuzuuz.99
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Sourcing ‘The Hobbit’
In an essay for The Guardian, John Garth identifies an interesting source for parts of Tolkien‘s The Hobbit: Native American lore.