New this week are A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts by Sebastian Faulks and the first six titles (A through F!) in Penguin’s snazzy new Penguin Drop Caps series.
Tuesday New Release Day: Faulks, Drop Caps
On The Making of The Blues Brothers
“‘We had a budget in the movie for cocaine for night shoots,’ [Dan] Aykroyd says.”
On Cocktails, Camaraderie, and Chaos
Times drink columnist Rosie Schaap discussed Drinking With Men in the pages of The Observer. Meanwhile, Derek Brown has some advice for bartenders across the country: for the love of all that is holy, stop inventing so many new, wild drinks!
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Bartholomew, DeLillo, Thomson
In a Grantland interview with Rafe Bartholomew, Don DeLillo talks Underworld, baseball, and Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”
“so this is the sound of you”
Why not kick off 2012 with former poet laureate W. S. Merwin’s poem, “To the New Year“?
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On Social Novels
“What if, instead of simply critiquing Go Set a Watchman’s failure, we tried to analyze it? The new, older work makes more sense if we read it as an attempt to accomplish two tasks: first, to master—unsuccessfully, it turns out—the smart-magazine style that Harper Lee developed in her student journalism; and second, to write in a genre that often relied on the ironic elisions typical of ‘smart style’: the midcentury social-problem novel.” Tom Perrin on Harper Lee and the social novel. Pair with Michael Bourne’s Millions review.
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The “Chicken Breast” of Spirits
How has a spirit legally defined as being “without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color” flourished in today’s economic climate? Victorino Matus‘ Weekly Standard article explores the history and ubiquity of vodka. Perhaps this article is best paired with something from NPR‘s list of “Great American Writers and Their Cocktails.”