Down with the “mocktail.” McSweeney’s has provided a helpful list of fun drinking games for non-drinkers. This Millions piece on eating and drinking and reading should help to whet your appetite.
Tiny Umbrellas and Baby Carrots
Burn Outs and Genre Blindness
Where does the “panic attack when you think you’re not reading enough” fit in to all of this? Here are a few professional readers on how they keep from mixing business with pleasure. This essay on Lewis Lapham and reading just for pleasure might also tickle your fancy.
Buy Me A Drink
In what reads like someone’s answer to the “who would you invite to a literary dinner party” question, novelists Jeanette Winterson and Marlon James sat down for a fantastic conversation at a Miami hotel bar. James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker prize earlier this year.
The Marriage Plot, The Movie?
Superbad and Adventureland director Greg Mottola is reportedly eying Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Marriage Plot for a possible big screen adaptation.
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Stephen King Picks Hesh Kestin
As part of World Book Night, a UK event designed to bring attention to books for adult readers, a number of famous authors have chosen books that they would recommend to readers. Stephen King’s selection was Hash Kestin’s small press effort The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats. Published by upstart Dzanc Books in the U.S. in 2009, the jolt of publicity generated by the King selection means the book will now be coming out in the UK as well. Our own Emily Mandel wrote a review of the book in 2010, calling it “a gritty enchantment”
Reel Art
“‘A good projectionist should be invisible,’ he says, his small rectangular glasses steadied on his forehead. ‘No one should be able to tell you’re in the booth changing the reels.’” A look at the hidden process of reel-to-reel cinema.
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Lunch Break
“Today I ate my shame, regurgitated it as a self-disgust, and digested it again as indolence. Known in the physical world as udon noodles with shrimp tempura,” Teddy Wayne told VICE. He and other writers (including our own Emily St. John Mandel) were profiled on what they eat for lunch. On the side: famous writers’ favorite snacks (Lord Byron liked to drink vinegar.)
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Nor Poetry
Pop quiz! What out-of-print book is more sought after by inquiring readers than any other? (Here’s a hint, before you click through and find out the depressing answer: the book is not a work of fiction.)