“A few weeks ago, I texted my writing group, ‘All I really want is to be just famous enough to have my own celebrity book club.’ I was kind of kidding. But I kind of wasn’t. Because, like portion-packaged organic snacks delivered to your door, isn’t book club ownership one step closer to having it all?” Laura Briskman on the faux intimacy of celebrity book clubs, as more and more celebrities start their own post Oprah.
Some Thoughts on Celebrity Book Clubs
Writing About Home in Pittsburgh
A nice complement to Edan’s essay today about writing in Los Angeles, The Metropolis Case author Matthew Gallaway writes about the challenges of representing his home city of Pittsburgh in his fiction. “For starters, there’s the question of accuracy.”
Yugolysses
The “Yugoslavian Ulysses,” (not actually titled Yugolysses) has been newly translated into English, and gets a thoughtful but mixed review in TNR.
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Reimagining Biography
“I’m drawn to books that deal in fragments and digressions, authors that patch together something larger from these pieces while also letting them stand on their own.” Sam Stephenson writes about “reimagining what a biography can look like” and reading Tennessee Williams: Notebooks, edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton, in a piece for The Paris Review. He also mentions Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, which Tyler Gillespie recently reviewed for The Millions.
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Leave It To TV
Recommended Reading: this piece from Electric Literature on how 80s television broached topics that we’re still afraid to talk about today. Here’s a bonus piece on reality television, as well.
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The Only Real Currency
“Produce like no one is listening. Distribute like nobody’s watching. Contribute like you’ve never been hurt.” Here is lil’ sweetheart Karl Marx like you’ve never seen him before — what a romantic!
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