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.
“Fight Club 4 Kids”
True Blood
Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Mysteries (recently reincarnated as HBO’s True Blood), talks with Barbara Peters of the Poisoned Pen Press and Bookstore for her interview series “The Criminal Calendar.” See the first of six YouTube installments here. Harris, like her most famous heroine, offers a mix of canny intuition and folksy charm. Asked about the bisexuality of one very old vampire in “the Sookie-verse” she answers Peters, “I figure if you live that long, you might as well diversify. Wouldn’t you get bored, you would think–you’d be willing to try anything if you live that long.”
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“Fruit flies or not, I do have a heart,”
It’s come to this. Since it first emerged, the @horse_ebooks Twitter feed has been alternately obsessed over and totally ignored for its ersatz Dadaism. Now a group of intrepid fans have begun writing fan fiction dedicated to its enigmatic writing prompts.
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Obsessing Over Women
Parul Sehgal cures your “bland biography”-induced malaise by prescribing “three delightfully deranging books” in which writers “riff on the women who’ve consumed them.”
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Harper Lee’s Unsolved Mystery
In 1970, Harper Lee came to a small town to write about a crime that occurred there, a gruesome murder that was staged to look like a car accident.
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On Doormats and Shoes
At Page-Turner, our own Mark O’Connell notes “a thrilling obscenity” in the works of Gonçalo M. Tavares, a Portuguese writer whose recent novel, Jerusalem, depicts a character with schizophrenia. A lesser-known symptom of the illness, apparently, is a tendency to treat inanimate objects like conscious (and social) beings. (We wrote about Tavares back in March.)
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Howard Jacobson on Table Tennis
Tablet Magazine publishes Booker prize winner (and one-time ranked junior table tennis player) Howard Jacobson’s essay on flamboyant ping-pong champ Marty Reisman for the first time in the U.S.
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