What if H.P. Lovecraft’s work were set in Hollywood instead of New England? At The Toast, Kevin Sharp writes Lovecraftian gossip columns. “Two very famous couples, both well known for their complicated personal lives and grand professional successes (less known, perhaps, for the horrid dark secrets that throb and scream in their antediluvian Hollywood mansions), met for a fateful dinner.”
Hollywood Horror
New Thomas Pynchon Teaser
Hot off the press: the first page of Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming novel Bleeding Edge, which is due to hit shelves on September 17.
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‘There is no sincerer love than the love of food’ – Shaw
Lapham’s Quarterly has released their Summer 2011 issue. Its topic? Food. They’ve even compiled the issue’s entire bibliography in case you’re interested.
The Virtues of Boring
Mark O’Connell’s recent essay in these pages discussed how long, challenging novels can hold you captive (in both the good and bad senses of that phrase). Now, in the Times, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott come to the defense of “the slow and the boring” in film, responding Dan Kois’s Times Magazine piece confessing he’s “suffering from a kind of culture fatigue and have less interest in eating my cultural vegetables.”
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A Lover’s Discourse
This Valentine’s Day, break out the Barthes and let critical theory decide the shape and scope of your sweet nothings.
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The Girl With the Pigtails
Could it be for the best that Lisbeth Salander outlived her creator? Do writers own the rights to their own superstar characters, or do the rights belong to the readers? These questions and more are explored in a fascinating essay from The Atlantic. Here’s a Millions piece in which Pippi Longstocking is touted as Salander’s literary forebear.
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