If you thought Cameron Diaz’s windshield sex scene in The Counselor was weird, things just got weirder for Cormac McCarthy. His ex-wife was arrested for pulling a gun out of her vagina after a domestic dispute about aliens escalated. Pair with: Our essay on McCarthy’s foray into screenwriting.
We Can’t Make This Up
Anne Frank’s Legacy
“Nathan Englander’s characters have invented ‘the Anne Frank game’ whose major question is ‘who would hide you if there were another Holocaust.’ By making this a game, the characters demonstrate their affective distance from the event, but at the same time Englander illustrates that the Holocaust remains a touchstone for the marijuana-smoking, Orthodox Jews who bring the game to their secular Jewish friends.” On the fictional afterlife of Anne Frank.
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It Becomes Your Dream
“All of your life, you think of that one fluid motion of power, terrorized by the fact we are capable of such collisions, such harm, such leveling of each other to flattened mountains, left to tunnel into ourselves, such wretched unhappiness, such unfathomable cruelty unless resurrected by the tenderness and affection of a lover, by kisses that leave us enthroned.” Major Jackson is next up in the Kiss series from Guernica Magazine — a weekly column which investigates that most intimate of human interactions, the kiss, in all its many manifestations.
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A Portrait of the Musician as a Young Man
James Joyce inspires a lot of English papers but not songs. Yet musician Casey Black based his song “Happiness” off of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. With lyrics like, “So I walk the Dublin streets like they were passageways through my soul,” we think Joyce would approve.
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Plotting The Booker: An Infographic
Are you writing a novel about an escaped tiger? (They’re quite popular these days.) Well, if you hope to win the Booker prize, you’d increase your odds by 1,300% if you switched your theme to “death.”
Goodreads Debut Author Discussion
At Goodreads, join debut novelists Malena Watrous, Peter Bognanni, Emily Gray Tedrowe, and Sonya Chung for a meaty and candid discussion, including confessions about procrastination and the fact that we all actually really enjoy writing. Moderated by Katrina Kittle. Click here to join.
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