Live in New York? Like Flavorpill? Then you should probably mosey on down to their event on Thursday, where they’ll be listening to the songwriter Holly Miranda and talking with Lindsay Hunter about her new book, Don’t Kiss Me. (If you’ll recall, our own Nick Moran wrote about Lindsay’s work here and here.)
But Do Listen
Hardcover Beauties
Penguin is putting out snazzy, mesmerizing, jacket-less hardcover editions of a number of classics. These remind of the old books on my parents’ shelves. You won’t be able to get your hands on these for a few months though.
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A Literary Thriller
Ahead of next week’s publication of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the battle over Stieg Larsson’s lucrative literary estate. (Thanks, Craig)
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Finnegans Punk
Forget One Direction. Meet the little known boy band made up of John Cage, James Joyce, and Joey Ramone. Cage composed a song based on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake called “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs,” which Ramone later sang to haunting effect.
The Real Racist
One thing that pretty much everyone can agree on is that Go Set a Watchman is a controversial book. Our own Michael Bourne said it “fails as a work of art in every way except as a corrective to the standard sentimental reading of Atticus Finch.” At Slate, Dan Kois, Meghan O’Rourke and Katy Waldman debate the main questions the novel raised.
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Harry Potter Before Harry Potter
“The Books of Magic makes The Lord of the Rings, The Avengers, Harry Potter, and even Twilight all look like entries in the same broad genre of tween-superhero fantasy, in which someone insignificant gets mighty powers, fights the forces of evil, and ultimately triumphs. …The pop culture landscape starts to look like an endless row of Tim Hunters, the same successful formula applied again and again.” From The Atlantic, a look at how Neil Gaiman‘s The Books of Magic prefigured the runaway success of Harry Potter and the modern YA fantasy-adventure craze.
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But Then Again, Who Wouldn’t Be?
I’m not that into ballet, but if I had to be, I’d be into 1,000 frame-per-second footage of German ballet dancers prancing around to a dance-y remix of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.”
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