What happens when you put one of the biggest literary egos together with music’s biggest ego? A movie. Bret Easton Ellis is working with Kanye West on a film. “He came and asked me to write the film,” Ellis told Vice. “I didn’t want to at first. Then I listened to Yeezus…I thought, regardless of whether I’m right for this project, I want to work with whoever made this.” This is an interesting pairing because Kanye definitely isn’t a reader.
In Kanye Land
Homewrecker
Recommended Reading: The Rumpus interview with Mark Z. Danielewski.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Hunter; Dee; Patterson; Harper; Middleton; Perham
Out this week: Eat Only When You’re Hungry by Lindsay Hunter; The Locals by Jonathan Dee; Rebellion by Molly Patterson; Red Light Run by Baird Harper; Darkansas by Jarret Middleton; and Double Portrait by Brittany Perham. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Dancing with The Rumpus
Tonight’s the night, Brooklynites! Join friends of The Rumpus for an evening of comedy, readings, and (of course) dancing. Festivities begin at 8pm.
The White Knight
Ryan Topper writes for Public Books about Netflix’s Beasts of No Nation and rejects the white savior plot that characterizes many child-soldier narratives. Pair with Noah Deutsch’s Millions review of the novel on which the series was based.
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The links
The Telegraph links all their reviews of Booker longlist titles from one page. If you want to get a look at these literary hotshots, there’s a photo gallery, too.Ed has read Chuck Klosterman, and he’s not very happy about it.The First Post, a new British online magazine leads with John Irving’s book reviewer-bashing.
Maman Called Today
“If to live is to suffer, and surviving is to find meaning in the suffering, does this explain why I have to spend precious time and money at work happy hours?” Existentialism for Millennials.
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Grit & Grace
At The New York Times, Stanley Fish on True Grit as “a truly religious movie” in its understanding of the Christian idea of grace.
Tuesday Links: Power, ReCaptcha, Junot Diaz
Experience “THE POWER OF BOOKS“You know those annoying puzzles where you type in the letters so the computer knows you’re not a computer creating a fake account or sending spam? A group from Carnegie Mellon is using these “Captchas” to help digitize books. ReCaptcha is a special type of Captcha that displays words that book digitization software is having trouble deciphering. So, by letting the computer know you’re not a computer, you can help some other computers digitize our books.I missed Junot Diaz’s appearance at the Free Library of Philadelphia where he read from his new novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Season Evans was there.