And here’s the glorious second, extended trailer.  I may be more excited to see this than I am to see almost anything else on the horizon.

Never, ever, ever.

part 2 after the jump

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showing how it's done

Being in L.A. at the moment, I read with interest this list at the Daily Beast titled The Five Best Novels on Hollywood.  (Also, happy Oscar weekend!  Turns out this is a big deal out here…)  I like Day of the Locust and The Last Tycoon but I’m mezzo-mezzo on Play It As It Lays and The Player (admittedly it’s been a long time since I read either).  The only one I haven’t read is Children of Light by Robert Stone. Anyway, I’d argue that two masterpieces are very, very missing from the list.

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how dare you submit to multiple publications at once?

“No simultaneous submissions” is open to interpretation, I feel.  I think one could reasonably take it to mean that the writer is expected to refrain from submitting the same piece to multiple venues on the same day or in the same week.  READ MORE >

hi it's me

I had an interesting morning.  Early this morning I sat down at my computer to write and realized that my computer had eaten, or I had deleted, ten pages that I wrote yesterday.

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[part one is here]

There’s a little girl sitting in the children’s section of Skylight Books reading a picture book; she looks about six or seven.  (Too old to be reading a picture book.  What the fuck?  I was reading Bunnicula by that age.)  I’m sitting in the back of the audience, so I can see into that section of the bookstore.  Kevin Sampsell, who is reading from A Common Pornography, can’t.  He doesn’t know that the little kid is listening to him read about the time he had manual sex with a stranger in the back of a porn shop.

Kevin Sampsell corrupting small child (courtesy Sabra Embury)

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i forgot until *after* posting this that i once smoked a cigarette with martin amis outside a PEN event. nice guy, rolls them by hand.

When Stephen King’s wife radically rerouted his career by pulling the manuscript of Carrie out of the trash, she had to clean the cigarette ash off of it before she could read it.  Later on he said that his pace as a writer slowed down for years when he quit smoking; without the nicotine, his pace was simply slower.
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smug asshole

We don’t run a lot of blind items, but it’s an available tag for posts, so… here’s a blind item.  READ MORE >

Wow, I just read the Bolaño story in the most recent New Yorker–it’s here, and it’s called “William Burns”–and I loved it.  First anything by Bolaño that I’ve loved.  I had very mixed feelings about 2666.  But this was great.  It kind of reminded me of a Ligotti story, with the degrees of distance from the narrator, the surreal dread, the shifting perceptions of the source of danger, and the dreamlike progression.  It feels like transcribed dream, which is of particular interest to me at the moment.

Similarly, I’m loving I. Fontana’s “UB” at Spork, just as I loved the Jean Harlow story from a while back.  I’m interested in anything Fontana writes these days; he knows what he’s doing.

slumberland

I met Paul Tremblay at last year’s ReaderCon, and then I read his novel The Little Sleep, a noir about a detective with narcolepsy.  His condition causes him to hallucinate and to confuse dreams with reality, which makes his investigations really difficult and his reliability as a narrator uncertain at best.  I really dug it.  Now there’s a sequel, No Sleep Till Wonderland, just out, so I asked Paul some sleep-related questions…

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David Lynch is excited about cardboard!  He’s also “kind of interested in stories.”  And he recently had an exhibition of his new paintings, which look pretty awesome.  Check out the video (from the David Lynch Foundation) and see Hollywood folks like Laura Dern and Thomas Jane admiring them too, set the Flaming Lips music.

portrait of the artist in the rye

Sad news.  J.D. Salinger has died. Feel free to speculate on the obvious (and I don’t mean cause of death)…

young salter: fighter pilot and ladies' man. what's your day job?

There is the knowledge of the senses that includes carnal happiness, and a greater knowledge that comes from intellect and reason. In the life we admire, one succeeds the other but does not dislodge it.

–James Salter, There and Then

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