Recommended Viewing: The trailer for Joel and Ethan Coen’s forthcoming film, Inside Llewyn Davis.
New Coen Brothers Trailer
Ahead of His Time
“Adrianne [Lobel] suspects that there’s another dimension to the series’s sustained popularity. Frog and Toad are ‘of the same sex, and they love each other,’ she told me. ‘It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.’ In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, [Arnold] Lobel came out to his family as gay.” On love and Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad.
“The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion.”
Anaïs Nin had a lot to say about writing erotic fiction. Notably, she was unwilling to “leave out the poetry” and “concentrate on sex” in its place, despite repeated requests from her anonymous client to do just that. On a lighter note, Seth Fried also has some advice for aspiring writers of erotica. Quick, somebody get both of these articles to E. L. James.
●
●
It Is Shark Week, After All
Bret Easton Ellis is collaborating with Taxi Driver director Paul Schrader on a new "psychological horror" movie about sharks. Coincidentally, HTMLGiant's Blake Butler just revisited Ellis' infamous novel American Psycho.
●
●
A Strange Kind of Love
"I slumped into an empty corner opposite Say Goodbye, Cattullus and wept into my knees for a half hour." Catherine Lacey writes for The Paris Review's "Revisited" series, "in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago." Pair with our own Bill Morris's consideration of artists whose works channel writers.
●
●
Paradoxical Rocket-Science Shit
This review of Paul Murray’s newest novel, The Mark and the Void, praises Murray for his biting, weapons-grade one-liners and calls it “the funniest book ever written about the international banking system.” Here’s a link to our own, particularly hilarious interview with Murray.
●
●
52 Years Since Lolita
52 years since Lolita: The Reader’s Almanac recounts the many publishers who turned down Nabokov’s masterpiece in 1953. From one rejection letter: “I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” (via @ElectricLit)
Tuesday New Release Day: Hanif, Grossman, Barnes
New this week is Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif and Lev Grossman's The Magician King and Julian Barnes's Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending are out in paperback.
●
●