As part of the latest chapter of the McConnaissance, Matthew McConaughey has been tipped to star in The Stand, the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s famous novel. McConnaughey is expected to play Randall Flagg, the malevolent sorcerer and necromancer. In the words of director Josh Boone, who also directed The Fault in our Stars, the movie will be “the Godfather of post-apocalyptic thrillers.” This might be a good time to read our own Lydia Kiesling on growing up with Stephen King.
El Diablo
Kindle Jollies
Nicholson Baker has written the funniest piece yet about the Kindle. Ed initially takes umbrage (and gets comments from Baker and recants somewhat). YPTR weighs in as well.
“Fight Club 4 Kids”
There are some charming children’s books, some really bad ones, and then finally there’s Fight Club 4 Kids, which somehow manages to be both. Watch Chuck Palahniuk read the (fake) children’s version of his classic novel in this video from Mashable.
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Talking to Ourselves
“Like walkie-talkies that require a button be pressed to speak and released to hear, does reading require that either the voice of the author or the voice of the reader’s consciousness be silenced at any given moment? Such an analogy suggests that reading is an act of hospitality toward another’s mind, in which we silence our voice in courtesy to the voice of another’s consciousness, a voice that alternates with our own in conversation.” John Biguenet on silent reading.
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We Just Turn to the Comics
In the NYRB, a new article on Chris Ware, accompanied by an old joke — dreamt up by none other than Gore Vidal — that a hypothetical New York Review of Comic Books might replace its eponymous predecessor. Last week, our own Mark O’Connell reviewed Mr. Ware’s latest book.
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“Instead of Sobbing, You Write Sentences”
“Most of the time I think of the self as a snare, and I don’t like being trapped in it. I try to reach out beyond my pittance of experience and connect to the world, but it turns out one way to do that is to be honest and accurate about my own life.” Leslie Jamison interviews Charles D’Ambrosio for The New Yorker. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen‘s review of D’Ambrosio’s Loitering.
Emazing
Fans of the French Oulipo movement will know about A Void, the Georges Perec novel written entirely without the use of the letter “e.” What very few readers of any kind know, however, is that in 1939, thirty years before Perec’s novel was published, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a book in English, Gadsby, that hewed to these same constraints. At The Atlantic, Nikhil Sonnad investigates how this experiment plays out in the book.
Why Pick One?
Does what you read affect your sex life? Does it help you come of age? Is it therapeutic?
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Any director who compares a movie he hasn’t even made to The Godfather is already setting himself up for failure and is probably a hack to begin with. Just because your teen weepie made a hundred million dollars doesn’t mean you’re a genius. But in a culture that equates money with intelligence I’m not surprised to hear this guy thinks this way about himself.