Here’s the perfect example of something you didn’t even know you wanted: Gary Oldman doing a dramatic reading from R. Kelly’s memoir, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me. This performance will surely join the pantheon of great pop culture readings alongside Christopher Walken’s reading of Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface” and John Lithgow’s reading of Newt Gingrich’s “florid” and “overwritten” press release.
So Oldman, Walken, and Lithgow Walk Onto a Stage…
Koestenbaum on Levé
Humiliation author Wayne Koestenbaum takes a page out of our own Mark O’Connell’s book to review Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Diamant; Horowitz; DFW; Davis
New this week: The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant; Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz; a limited edition of The David Foster Wallace Reader; and The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems by Olena Kalytiak Davis (which I wrote about last week). For more on these and other recent titles, go read our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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To Be Outnumbered
“At first I had three [children], because I think we need to be outnumbered. It’s good for them. That was my plan when I had three children.” Sit down with Karl Ove Knausgaard as he drives his daughter home. Jonathan Callahan reflects on how Knausgaard’s writing consumes him.
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The Fittest Theory
In the mid-aughts, Jonathan Gottschall pioneered “literary Darwinism,” a new form of analysis which applied evolutionary theory to works of literature. It was part of a wider upheaval in English departments across the country. Now, more than ten years later, we can make an assessment: how’d it work out for Gottschall? The answer: not well. (h/t The Paris Review Daily)
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Mapping the Territory
“No map can be a perfect representation of reality; every map is an interpretation, which may be why writers are so drawn to them,” Casey N. Cep writes about the fictional map at The New Yorker. Pair with: Our review of Where You Are.
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Letterman Has Done Creepy Things
David Letterman has possibly topped himself. As told on the show last night, he has been doing some creepy things. Click here for the video of one of the most bizarre, fascinating — and arguably brilliant, from a PR standpoint — mea culpas in recent history.