Although we’ll never get the chance to read Walter White’s memoir, we’ll get the next best thing. Bryan Cranston is writing a memoir due out next year. “With this book, I want to tell the stories of my life and reveal the secrets and lies that I lived with for six years shooting Breaking Bad,” he said. While you wait, grab a book from our Breaking Bad reading list.
Heisenberg’s Memoirs
On Tour
Noah Charney writes for The Atlantic in defense of book tours, which “mostly entail maneuvering to get on radio shows or TV programs, and less glamorous elements, like attending bookstore readings where hardly anyone shows up.”
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Marlon James’s Minnesota
"In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them. By now, the person I created in New York was the only one I wanted to be. ...Eight years after reaching the end of myself, I was on borrowed time. Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica." Marlon James, author of The Book of Night Women, which once gave me so much trouble, and whose novel A Brief History of Seven Killings the Book Report covered here, writes for the New York Times Magazine about leaving Jamaica to find himself in Minnesota.
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Otherworldly
No one knows quite how to categorize Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Unreality, in part because it has elements of a novel, a memoir and a long poem. The early 20th century Romanian writer chronicled his own slow death and the effect it had on his senses. At The Paris Review Daily, Andrei Codrescu writes about a reissue of the book.
Fiction Writers: Soloists or Thieves?
From Lev Grossman’s blog, “A Brief Taxonomy of Writers”: “As far as I can tell there are two kinds of fiction writers: those who read no fiction while they write, and those who constantly read fiction while they write. Let’s have cute names for them. We’ll call them Soloists and Thieves."
I Need to Return Some Redbox DVDs
Patrick Bateman as internet troll? I could see it. Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, stopped by Town and Country to muse over how an early-twentieth century Patrick Bateman might behave a bit differently: "I check in with Patrick every now and then—as with this article you're reading—but he has been living his own life for some time now, and I rarely feel as if I have guardianship over him, or any right to tell him where he would or would not be today, decades after his birth."
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Shirley Clarke Project Commences
Shirley Clarke, older sister of Elaine Dundy (who wrote Millions favorite The Dud Avocado), was an Academy Award-winning filmmaker. If you're curious about her work, you'll be happy to learn that Milestone Films will soon begin their Shirley Clarke Project by releasing her restored documentaries, and on Friday, May 4th, they'll be releasing her first film, The Connection. You can check out a trailer here. (via)
Elections and All
Recommended Reading: John Williams suggests some reads as we prepare for the presidential primaries.
On Hikikomoris, Etc.
Recommended Reading: Larissa Pham on Milena Michiko Flašar’s I Called Him Necktie.
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