John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats fame has a debut novel, Wolf in White Van, longlisted for the National Book Award, and Dwight Garner reviews the “strange and involving” novel for The New York Times.
“Eyes Without a Face”
Cat’s TV
This week in book-to-film adaptation news: Kurt Vonnegut‘s Cat’s Cradle is slated to become a TV show, “which will hopefully be long enough to fill an entire week’s worth of classes” for any desperate English teachers out there.
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Free Poetry!
In honor of National Poetry Month, the Poetry Foundation will offer free copies of the April 2013 issue of Poetry. Sign up by March 24th!
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#LitBeat gets weird in a basement.
The latest installment of #LitBeat involves musings on puritanical projection, the phrases “ass-banging” and “mucus flaps” and a least one instance of the word “boner.” Our correspondent was there for The New Inquiry read along of Millions contributor Mike Thomsen’s new book, Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men.
In/sane
If you’re not already a fan of Will Self, his new book, Shark, may not be the best place to start. As Walker Rutter-Bowman points out, the book dispatches with many of the conventions of modern writing, including line breaks, paragraphs and dialogue tags. But it’s still an effort worthy of its author, he writes: “Here is a hunk of modernism that poignantly, beautifully, and, it seems, genuinely renders mental states of sanity and insanity while smudging the gradations in between.”
Revisiting Olive with Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout discusses the surprising popularity of Olive Kitteridge, and why she revisited the character in her new book, Olive, Again.
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Archer as Animated Comix
Charles Bock traces the lineage of FX’s Archer past fellow animated shows like The Simpsons and all the way back to comics. Or, more specifically, Bock traces the lineage back to comix, “cartoons for adults — or, rather, for those above the age of consent.”
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