I’ve made no secret of my love and admiration for Joan Didion. I first read her when I was an editorial assistant at a big publishing house. Blue Valentine was the movie everyone in the bullpen was discussing, and I YouTubed Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams to see how their chemistry translated off-screen (it was pretty epic). Fortuitously, I came across a Nightline segment where Michelle discussed Heath Ledger’s death, and how she read Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking to help cope with his passing. “It didn’t seem unlikely to me that he could walk through a door or could appear from behind a bush,” she said in the interview. “It was a year of very magical thinking.”
Read MoreAcclaimed Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn is no stranger to Fantastic Fest, appearing in 2013 with Jodorowsky’s Dune and again last year for the documentary My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn directed by his wife Liv Corfixen. He returned once again this year with Fantastic Fest serving as the perfect launching pad for his new book Nicolas Winding Refn: The Act of Seeing.
Read MoreIt’s been 55 years since we last heard from Pulitzer Prize winning author Harper Lee, but that silence ends this summer. Lee, inarguably one of the greatest writers of our time, will release a sequel to her famed and much beloved novel To Kill a Mockingbird this year. Entitled Go Set a Watchman, the book is set to come out in July, with a proposed run of two million copies, says publisher Harper.
Read MoreLove lasts forever, or at least until we’re dead. And let’s face it, we’re all going to die. Some of us swiftly and tragically, some slowly over a gruelingly long period of time. Either way, we all face the same fate – that long black corridor of eternity. Our literary characters are no different. They’ll meet their fate at some point during the narrative, or maybe long after the final pages have turned, careening forever toward their destiny, entertaining us along the way.
When a character is taken from us, plucked from the narrative in some dramatic way, it hurts. It truly hurts. Their demise, though completely made up, haunts us. As in real life, we’re often left thinking about what could have been – if only they wouldn’t have made that stupid choice, got on that plane, lit that fire, etc. But, much to the author’s devilish delight, we must live with their deaths. And it’s even more heart wrenching when the characters are in love. Because what doesn’t make your eyes fill like water reservoirs more than a tragic love and death?
Read MoreWithin our personal existence there’s so many experiences we will never truly know. A select few of us experience the vast, depthless wonder of stepping onto the moon, while others live in the lap of luxury, afforded the gifts of all creation at their whim. There are triumphant athletes and hero firemen, medical geniuses and musical prodigies. Then there are those that live a less thrilling life by those standards, those that live the lives of the ordinary people of the world. Those that read about the extraordinary and wonder what could be, or maybe just don’t give a shit about any of it at all. They live with little means to make happiness bloom, and never fully know how much better their lives can be.
Enter Ugly Girls, the new novel by the fiercely talented Lindsay Hunter. Known for her assaultive flash fiction, pieces that shout the tales of crude and forgotten denizens of planet earth with visceral poetry, she’s an author with little regard to boundaries. Not surprisingly, her novel doesn’t stray far from that broken glass covered path. Written from several points-of-view, all of them deeply insightful to the human condition, and sometimes upsetting in their own morbid ways, you’re taken on a no-fucks-given journey through the minds of people who have not quite given up hope, but are standing, shaky legged and tippy-toed, at the brink of the cliff, ready to fall into the quarry of no turning back.
Read MoreEdan Lepucki was just minding her own writerly business when she was suddenly thrust into the center of a pop culture frenzy earlier this year. When her book, California, came up on the TV screen one evening, brought forth by the hands of none other than Stephen Colbert, her fate as a famed author was sealed. Since then, she’s had quite the ride.
Read MoreImagine you’re sending some personal emails between busy Monday meetings, casually describing to the recipient your recent and brutal knife murder of both a dog and a man. The ads generated in the subsequent email chain would likely be relevant to knife sharpening, or maybe animal care. However, if you use a racial slur, Google would serve you no ads at all.
This is what happened to Patrick Bateman, the infamous killer from Brett Easton Ellis’s much loved and hated anti-consumerist, 80s bloodbath, American Psycho. Well, it’s what would’ve happened had he been real and in 2014. Oh, and sending emails regarding his depravity.
Read More“I created myself. I have taught myself so much.” – Maya Angelou
World renowned author, poet, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou has died at the age of 86. She’s reportedly battled health problems in the past few months, and recently canceled a scheduled an event appearance to be held in her honor.
Read MoreDavid Foster Wallace once said, “The person I’m highest on right now is George Saunders.”
At twenty-nine years old with no steady income other than the .10 cents a word I get from my freelancing gigs, I am shocked that I am able to afford a better drugdealer than the late David Foster Wallace’s.
Don’t let my bad pun fool you. George Saunders is indeed worthy of a good high. Just this past summer he gave the commencement speech for the Syracuse University class of 2013 where he famously said: “So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly. I’d say as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.”
Read MoreThe New York Times has an interesting piece up on the many iterations book covers go through before they hit the shelves. It’s a concise lineage of the moments that lead to “getting it right.”
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