Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader are using Kickstarter to raise $100,000 for an indie movie entitled The Canyons. The film “documents five twenty-something’s quest for power, love, sex and success in 2012 Hollywood,” and, if you donate $5,000, Ellis will provide notes on your novel. According to New York, this Ellis-Schrader film is not to be confused with their other one about sharks, alluded to most recently by Ellis in his Paris Review interview (Reg. Req.).
$5,000 Is Less Than Most Freelancers
Ten Years in the Making
" I love the shape of words, I love the comet-tail histories of words. I love the roll and crunch of syllables in my mouth." In Electric Literature, Laura van den Berg interviews R.O. Kwon about religious fanaticism, "unknowing," and her upcoming debut novel, The Incendiaries. Pair with: Kwon's 2017 Year in Reading.
Books Nobody Reads
Maybe nobody read your first, or last, most recent or only book, but writer, take heart: nobody read the work of these 10 great authors either.
“A Minor Manifesto”
Ian Crouch writes for The New Yorker about a new version of The Sun Also Rises, which gives readers a peak into Hemingway's drafts and revisions. Crouch believes that by reading these drafts carefully, one can pick out a "minor manifesto" that "conceives of a book with greater intellectual and artistic ambitions than Hemingway ever produced." In the words of Hemingway's character Jake Barnes, "Isn''t it pretty to think so?" Pair with our own review of the latest edition of The Sun Also Rises.
The Believer Book Award
To add to the awards lists, Believer has announced its editors' shortlist for the Believer Book Award, which looks to acknowledge "the strongest and most underappreciated" novels of the year. The shortlist includes Danielle Dutton's Sprawl; Kira Henehan's Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles (reviewed for The Millions); James Hynes' Next, Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps (reviewed for The Millions); and Paul Murray's Skippy Dies (reviewed here).
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RIP Chinua Achebe
According to the Times, The Guardian and other sources, Things Fall Apart author Chinua Achebe has died. Last October, we published a review of his final book, There Was a Country, which you might want to reread as a first step to considering his legacy. (You could also check out our piece on Things Fall Apart.)
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War and Peace and the Gita
Recommended reading: The New York Review of Books reviews at Richard Davis's The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography and the way centuries of politics can alter our interpretations of religious texts.
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