File this one under “Things I Didn’t Know I Needed” — actor Paul Giamatti playing Honoré de Balzac hopped up on fifty coffees.
A Light Roast, Please
The Hobbit, Animated
Sure, the trailer for Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Hobbit got everyone talking, but it's so three weeks ago. Here's something really fresh: a twelve-minute "animatic" version of The Hobbit produced by legendary animator Gene Deitch in 1966.
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Beware of the Gravedigger
Recommended Reading: On the literary tradition of objectifying and consuming women’s corpses.
Looking for America
Recommended Viewing: Photographer Alec Soth and writer Brad Zellar's LBM Dispatch, "an irregularly published newspaper of the North American ramblings." The New Yorker has a gallery of 14 of Soth's haunting photos that capture the fleeting spirit of America.
Gore Vidal Died
Gore Vidal has died at the age of 86. The prominent author, screenwriter, Norman Mailer-nemesis and political activist published 25 novels, two memoirs and many, many essay volumes in addition to plays, screenplays, and television scripts. For a time, he even loaned his own visage to the silver screen, as Mindy Hung recently pointed out on our site.
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On Board The Pequod
Recommended reading: Ben Shattuck spends a night and a day aboard a New England whaling ship in an attempt to better understand Ishmael's (and Melville's) experiences, and combines Moby-Dick excerpts with his own accounts of life onboard in a piece for The Atlantic.
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Writing from the Self
Year in Reading alumnus Alexander Chee has a guide for writing an autobiographical novel. He writes, “The woods is your life. You are the axe.” Pair with this Millions piece in defense of autobiography.
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