Is there a better way to honor Norman Mailer than by throwing a few punches? Nate Freeman was bored at the book party for J. Michael Lennon’s new biography, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, so he got into a drunken fist fight in Mailer’s apartment. We bet Mailer would approve.
In the Ring with Norman Mailer
Reading Material
BuzzFeed has launched READER, a new home for literary writing, featuring an essay by Melissa Broder, poetry by Jericho Brown, and a short story from Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.
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Black Bodies Matter
“All the rage and mourning and angst works to exhaust you; it eats you alive with its relentlessness.” The New York Times‘ Jenna Wortham on self-care during a summer rife with violence against people of color.
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“I was on the edge of crazy.”
Recommended Reading: the first two chapters of Roxane Gay’s novel, An Untamed State, which are available courtesy of Longreads.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Unferth; Grodstein; Carter; Journey; Brown; Lethem
Out this week: Wait Till You See Me Dance by Deb Olin Unferth; Our Short History by Lauren Grodstein; Lucky You by Erika Carter; An Arrangement of Skin by Anna Journey; The River of Kings by Taylor Brown; and More Alive and Less Lonely by Jonathan Lethem. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Unread Books
Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, cops to a list of classic books he’s never read. Among them: Jane Eyre, Blood Meridian, and Millions Hall-of-Famer Stoner.
Anything for Money
On Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading Tumblr, check out National Book Award finalist Karen E. Bender’s short story “Anything for Money.”
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Masochism and Drama
“Ghosts are just the fucked-up dead.” This interview with David Mitchell on the release of his spooky new novel Slade House is a perfect Halloween read. We interviewed Mitchell this same time last year in conjunction with the publication of The Bone Clocks.
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Algorithmic Forecasting
The Financial Times takes a detailed look at the Financial Computing Centre, home of future quants, where Michael Galas is working to build “a hedge fund without employees” and a crop of PhD candidates are using social media to predict the markets. Could these algorithms one day spill beyond finance, and influence education or social sciences?