Last week Zadie Smith, acclaimed novelist and Year in Reading alum, was presented with The Moth Award for storytelling. She gave a charming acceptance speech, video of which can be found here, and we definitely recommend watching!
Zadie Smith wins The Moth Award
Told By An Idiot
There are few better ways to spice up a Monday morning than with a Shakespearean choose-your-own adventure story. If it please thee, proceed to McSweeney’s. Then come back to The Millions and check out these pieces on the Bard.
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Delicious Reads
Attention Los Angeles-based readers and eaters! On Tuesday evening, June 29, 2010, Michelle Huneven and Samantha Peale will be at Canele in Atwater Village to celebrate the paperback releases of their latest novels (Blame and The American Painter, Emma Dial, respectively.) Food from the books will be served–the 3-course dinner is only $34. Skylight will be selling the books.
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Infinite Stupidity
Why innovate when you can just Google and copy? Mark Pagel on the perils of “being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet.”
Hunter S. Thompson’s Job Application
From Hunter S. Thompson’s 1958 job application to the Vancouver Sun: “And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you. I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham.”
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Russian Love Stories; Russian Persecution
Masha Gessen has been busy of late. Within months of publishing her investigative look at the charges for Russian punk band, Pussy Riot, Gessen has also co-edited a book entitled Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories. Over at The Independent, you can check out a review of the two projects, and over at Guernica, you can read an interview in which Gessen discusses both works.
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Stumped and Delighted
This fantastic essay from The Rumpus argues for the abandonment of realism in American fiction. Charles Finch wrote an essay for The Millions on the truce between realism and fabulism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that pairs quite nicely.