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
Zazen!
Congratulations are in order for Vanessa Veselka: PEN American has awarded her debut novel Zazen the Robert W. Bingham Prize. I first heard about the novel last year, from what was then the brand-spanking-new LARB, though this Minnesota Public Radio profile of Veselka is also a great way to get acquainted with her exciting talents.
●
●
“Sometimes America reaches maximum volume”
If you’re anything like me, you’re likely to be intrigued by a series with the title Novelists in Restaurants Eating Food. If you’re a lot like me, to the point where it may be a cause for concern, you’ll be doubly intrigued by the prospect of Charles Yu paying a visit to Buffalo Wild Wings. Sample quote: “I’m not sure what I was expecting, but the restaurant simultaneously managed to exceed, disappoint, and exactly meet these expectations.”
●
●
Behind the Beautiful Forevers Headed to the Stage
The National Theater in London plans on adapting Behind the Beautiful Forevers into a stage production, reports John Williams. Don’t miss Paul Morton’s Millions interview with Katherine Boo from last year.
●
●
The Right to Complain
It’s a truth as old as academia: graduate students moan about the lengths of their dissertations. But which grad students are most entitled to complain? Herewith, a chart that compares dissertation lengths by major.
Lend Me Talent
Last Friday marked the feast day of Francis de Sales, better known as the patron saint of writers and journalists. The saint, who lived in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, got his title thanks to his propensity for using flyers and pamphlets to convert people to Catholicism. At The Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring reads the saint’s most famous work, Introduction to the Devout Life.
●
●
The Summer of Butterflies
In his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov travelled widely, logging many years each in St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Ithaca, New York, where he wrote Lolita while teaching at Cornell. His peripatetic history explains why few people know he spent a summer in Utah, during which he spent a lot of time chasing butterflies and fishing in the streams. In The American Scholar, an excerpt of Nabokov in America, an upcoming book by Richard Roper. You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.
●
●