Jaden Smith is going from an action movie career to starring in an adaptation of James McBride’s National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. Liev Schreiber will play John Brown. If you’re unsure about casting a rapper to play the protagonist, take it up with McBride, who is also producing the film.
The Good Lord Bird Goes Hollywood
A Story of Decline
Last month, in a review for The Millions, Chris Barsanti called George Packer's The Unwinding an “awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul.” Now, in The Guardian, Sukhdev Sandhu calls the book “decent, meticulous and concerned,” though it could have benefited from the “roiling prose-fire of Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi.”
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Hatchet Man
“Book reviews are another matter, because a bad review has the potential to be far more adversarial: one writer spending years on a book, one reviewer spending days reading it, and a lasting relationship being created between the two in print. Or, perhaps, a history between the two that lends the review a particular piquancy.” An exegesis of the good bad review.
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Homework Diary is Currently Full
"Dear Mrs D, Thanks for your homework. Your idea of writing a Christmas ghost story was a good one, but it’s not really the kind of thing I tend to do — it’s a little bit too genre for my tastes. Try Kevin, who sits next to me. He loves that stuff." Over at McSweeney's, Nick Hornby advises his son on excuses for failing to hand in his English homework, excuses which Hornby learned are acceptable during a thirty-year career in journalism, books, and film.
A 2BR/2BA of your Own
Broke New York writers - by which we mean, New York writers - take note: the city's Department of Housing is allotting a small number of $1,022 two-bedroom apartments to working artists through a convenient online application. (If that's too rich for your blood, though, we've also noted previously that Write a House is giving away free houses to writers in Detroit.)
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Election Night in Chicago
I was lucky enough to attend President Obama's Election Night rally in Chicago, and wrote a diary of the evening for The Awl. "Let's Stay Together" played, Vivica A. Fox walked by.
“Norman was the very antithesis of minimalism”
Apart from calling up visions of a Carver-Mailer axis of literary minimalism, these remarks by Joyce Carol Oates upon winning the Mailer Prize convince us that Mailer had quite the unflappable ego.
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Huh? I thought John Brown was supposed to be old. Or at least older. I love Liev Schreiber but…I don’t know about that casting.
John Brown was in his late 50s; Schreiber is 46 — a beard and a little makeup and he should do just fine.
As for Jaden Smith — he may be a rapper, but he’s primarily an actor and, of course, Will Smith’s son.