Recommended Reading: Iranian novelist-in-exile Shahriar Mandanipour talks about censorship, religion, and love in Little Village.
Censoring an Iranian Story
NBCC Finalist Party
The NBCC finalists will be announced tonight at an event in New York City, and you’re invited! The event will feature drinks, hors d’ouevre, and (probably) a lot of reading glasses.
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Guy Fawkes Night
“Remember, Remember the Fifth of November / Gunpowder, treason, and plot.” Edward Casey of Electric Literature recalls childhood memories of the strange, lawless, primal, pagan celebration of Guy Fawkes Night–and readers around the world grow jealous.
“I don’t remember any of these pages.”
“Audiobooks Read By You: Just like reading a book without actually reading a book, by reading a book and recording it in a studio.”
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“In the distance, a low rumble. A train?”
Barrelhouse editor Dave Housley wrote a “Commercial Fiction” piece for Hobart’s website about the “trippy magical realism” in Coors Light advertisements. You know what that means, right? People all over the world! Join hands. Start a love train. (Love train.)
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Free Poetry!
How would like to receive some free issues of Poetry magazine for your book club? Poetry, by the way, answered our call in our Tumblr round-up and has since joined the platform.
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Setting the Bar Quite High
Believing that high quality TV dramas have supplanted silver screen blockbusters, and now rival novels as “the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories,” Salman Rushdie is set to pen a science fiction series for Showtime. The show will be called “The Next People.” Yet while he’s cited “The Wire” as a source of inspiration, the novelist also backhandedly referred to it as “just a police series.” (A stance he defended on Twitter.) Controversial? Perhaps. But still nothing compared to him calling “Game of Thrones” “very addictive garbage.” Later on, when asked by Vulture to list some of his favorite TV shows, Rushdie curiously counted “Entourage” among them.
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Like Something in the Movies
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of those rare few classic novels that translates well to the big screen. To some extent, this was intentional — Nabokov often wrote fiction with an eye to selling film rights. John Colapinto writes about the author’s relationship with the cinema over at Page-Turner. You could also read our own Lydia Kiesling’s Modern Library Revue of Lolita.