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…
Hatchet Job Prize
Turns out Americans aren’t the only ones who adore snark. The novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones has won the first Hatchet Job prize from the British website Omnivore for his blistering takedown of Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, By Nightfall. Mars-Jones beat out Geoff Dyer’s slam of Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. “It isn’t terrible,” Dyer wrote, “it’s just so…average.”
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Where Can We Get a Copy
Did you know there was such a thing as the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards? It’s true. Since 2007, Australia has named winners annually in six categories (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s fiction, young adult fiction, and Australian history) – and the prize money’s pretty good, too. Speaking of prizes, you might also want to check out the list of U.S. National Book Awards finalists here.
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Dispatch from Planet Earth
Excerpts from Anthony Michael Morena’s The Voyager Record: A Transmission are now available online in Ninth Letter. Morena combines flash fiction and prose poetry in his record of the phonograph record that was included on the Voyager spacecrafts. The record plated with gold contained 27 songs, 118 images, and greetings in 55 languages, and was meant to summarize all life on Earth for the extraterrestrials.
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The Novel’s Topography
For at Blunderbuss Magazine, What Belongs to You author Garth Greenwell goes through his old notebooks and describes his creative process. Also check out Jameson Fitzpatrick’s review of the novel.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Carey, Mieville, Murakami
New today are Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears and China Mieville’s Railsea. And Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is now out in a snazzy three-volume boxed-set paperback edition.
All Told
You might have heard that a new Shirley Jackson book appeared on shelves this week. A collection of previously unpublished work, Let Me Tell You was published by Penguin Random House, which happens to be the place where Benjamin Dreyer, a lifelong Shirley Jackson fan, works as a copy chief and managing editor. At The Toast, he describes how it felt to edit his favorite writer.
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