The first trailer has been released for the cinematic adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County. Here are two of my favorite scenes (one, two) from the play to whet your appetite. The film, which is directed by John Wells, is scheduled for a November release.
August: Osage County Gets a Trailer
Dear White People
“[S]ometimes, one of the best ways to better understand racism is to just pick up a book.” As part of a recent tweet about his availability for racial consultation, Colson Whitehead recommended an evergreen Huffington Post piece entitled “16 Books About Race That Every White Person Should Read“, a list that includes Claudia Rankine‘s Citizen, T. Geronimo Johnson‘s Welcome to Braggsville, and The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which we reviewed here. We hope he’s collecting referral fees.
Caleb Azuma Nelson Wants Readers to Get Vulnerable
Caleb Azuma Nelson discusses his debut novel, Open Water, and the role its second person narrator plays in drawing out readers' vulnerability.
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Survival of the Sleek in Publishing
In today’s NY Times, former Simon & Schuster executive Joni Evans ruminates on the Darwinian transformation of publishing, from tactile and sensory (paper and fountain-pen stains and typewriter bells) to e-everything (bidding wars and clean desks); she herself picked flight over fight.
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True Coffeeshop Story
“Literary interviews became popular in the eighteen-eighties, but Richard Altick, the late professor of Victorian literature at Ohio State University, traces the public fascination with writers’ homes at least as far back as the eighteen-forties, when there was a vogue for books describing the houses and landscapes of famous authors, complete with engravings and, later, photographs.” On the strangeness of literary celebrity.
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Something Is Off
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