David Sedaris chats with The New York Times about his reading habits in the first installment of their latest series, “By the Book.”
“I did most of my reading at the International House of Pancakes.”
Irv Loathed NPR
Recommended Reading: A piece of new fiction by Joanthan Safran Foer! Go check out “Maybe It Was the Distance” over at The New Yorker. Here’s a review of Foer’s Tree of Codes by Kevin Nguyen for The Millions which calls the format of the book, “a wonderful experiment in what a book can be, and also home to a mediocre novel.”
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The Master and the Big Screen
Russian movie producer Svetlana Migunova-Dali is working with U.S. producer Grace Loh, who produced Hot Tub Time Machine, to adapt Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita for the big screen. They say they’re working with a feature film budget of up to $100 million, and they want A-list actors to fill out the cast.
Hunger Games Madlibs
Happy Hunger Games! To celebrate the release of Catching Fire, read Ben Blatt’s textual analysis of the most popular adverbs, adjectives, and sentences used by Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games trilogy, Stephenie Meyer in Twilight, and J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series. Unsurprisingly, the most popular sentence in Twilight is, “I sighed.” We’re sighing, too. Pair with: Our essay on how teen fantasy heroines need to grow up.
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The Ministry of Fear
“Nowadays, we tend to place spies into a cold war narrative: East vs. West, intrigue around the Berlin Wall, Graham Greene’s Vienna, and George Smiley’s London. But the first and most successful Soviet spies emerged much earlier.”
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“Yesterday / Is two days before tomorrow”
Recommended Reading: “Yesterday,” Haruki Murakami’s new piece in The New Yorker. (I’ll give you one guess to name the band it’s about.) And speaking of Murakami, his latest novel has an official book trailer now.
A Poetic Comeback
Jennifer Hizaji takes a look at the recent rise in poetry's popularity in the United States, the first increase in readers since about 2002.
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The Noughtie List
Kottke.org has taken on the daunting task of rounding up all the “Best of the 2000s” lists out there. Related: Fimoculous is rounding up all the “Best of” lists for 2009.
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