Game of Thrones is dead. Er, over. Oh no! What to read now? Over at Electric Literature, Seth D. Michaels has you covered, suggesting a list of books to read post-GoT that includes work by N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and Kirstin Downey. “At its best,” Michaels writes, the original book series “is both a page-turning adventure and a revisionist fantasy, surfacing some of the hard questions underneath the tropes of the genre. Who has a legitimate claim on power, and what can they do with it? How does the past determine and constrain today? How can women exert power in a cruel and oppressive world? How do personal relationships shape politics, and vice-versa?”
Books for a Post-‘Game of Thrones’ World
The Literate Frontman
Some of Jeff Tweedy‘s favorite writers: “I like Henry Miller a lot. I like William H. Gass a lot. Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut. . . . I used to walk into bookstores when I was a kid and get the stuff that looked the craziest and the most free.” (In a Rolling Stone interview, unavailable online.)
●
●
The View from Out Here
“Sometimes I fear that Midwestern authors are seen from a similar vantage point: that many of us are ‘fly-over writers’ to whom readers wave (or just ignore completely) as they make their way to Saul Bellow and Stuart Dybek and Marilynne Robinson. I fear that these bigger names, along with a few others (Charles Baxter, Lorrie Moore), are seen as exceptions to the general rule that little of cultural worth grows in this flat, middle stretch of the country.” On the plight of the literary Midwesterner.
●
●
What Charlie Kaufman Has to Offer
In 2011, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind screenwriter Charlie Kaufman gave a 70-minute lecture at the BFI in London. Little did he know Eliot Rausch would take snippets from that lecture, set them to accompanying, complementary visual clips, and turn the entire thing into a marvelous, beautiful video entitled What I Have to Offer.
●
●
Chatting with Rushdie
“A lot of writers are big readers. Very often, when you’re writing your day’s work, something you write will remind you of something that you read. And the thing that you read shines a kind of light on the sentences that you’re writing. So I think it would be very hard to write without having read a great deal.” Listen to Salman Rushdie chat with Paul Holdengraber about poetry, film, and his latest project. Liam Hoare writes on the implications of Rushdie’s fatwa.
Meg Wolitzer Wonders
Recommended reading: Meg Wolitzer wonders “why are teenage girls drawn to books about mental instability?“
A dimension of mind
There are two essays on the narrative genius behind The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling, over at Berfrois: Michael A. Moodian on how using genre tropes allowed Serling to tell politically volatile stories during the McArthy era of Hollywood, and Christopher Cappelluti takes a look at how The Twilight Zone changed television history.
●
●