Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is now a reality. He got to try Google Glass and wrote about the experience for The New Yorker. “When the velvet-rope hostess at the of-the-moment Wythe Hotel bar in Williamsburg stops to take a photo of me with her iPhone, I know exactly what the producer meant. This is the most I will ever be loved by strangers.”
Gary Shteyngart Becomes A Glasshole
Marlon James Reads
Recommended listening: Marlon James reads an excerpt from his new book, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which was included in our most recent Book Preview. Pair with The New York Time‘s review of the novel.
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The Best ‘Homemade’ Video Games
“Video games are worth loving, but loving them comes with shame. Not passing regret or social embarrassment, but a sharp-edged physical guilt: the hunch-backed, raw-fingered, burning-eyed pain that comes at the sad and greasy end of an all-night binge. You have ostentatiously, really viciously wasted your life; you might as well have been masturbating for the last nine hours—your hands, at least, would feel better.” Gabriel Winslow-Yost reviews the best “homemade” video games for n+1.
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Here We Go, I Guess
Bret Easton Ellis was apparently serious when he said he wanted to adapt Fifty Shades of Grey for the big screen. He even has a cast and director in mind.
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A Most Terrible State
Yesterday I told you about a ridiculously rare signed copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem famously loaded with coldness and sterility and failed human intimacy. Later this month, some new letters will be published that reveal the depth of Eliot’s mental anguish over the breakdown of his first marriage with his wife, Vivien. Eliot has long been accused (maybe fairly) of treating Vivien with intolerable cruelty and attributing to her mental state, and these letters aim to complicate that narrative.
There Are Worse Destinations
Bad news: due to the changing climate and rising sea levels, all 103,000 inhabitants of Kiribati have to permanently evacuate their homes. Good news: they may all get to move to Fiji.
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New Zadie Smith
Recommended reading: new fiction from Zadie Smith in the New Yorker, “Escape from New York.”
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Arthur Phillips, Still Writing
This thoroughly entertaining conversation between Robert Birnbaum and Arthur Phillips is not to be missed. Topics include faking Shakespeare, beagles, being anti-social in Brooklyn, pilates, and writing for a living.
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