My puberty ostrich
1. @Gawker, 4chan founder tries to explain ‘b-tard’ to federal prosecutors.
2. @Thought Catalog, Brandon Scott Gorrell lists all the drugs he’s taken in chronological order, in 4 parts.
3. Tony O’Neill is reading at the In The Flesh reading series August 19 in NYC, details here. Also, here is in conversation with Adam Carolla.
4. I enjoy creative interpretation of indistinguishable language.
5. Anybody read Tom McCarthy’s C. yet? I am curious to hear about it.
Another thing I’d do if I lived in NYC.Young, Joseph. NAME: a vampire novel (2010)
Joseph Young says, “I began writing NAME, my vampire novel, on July 7, 2010 and completed the first draft on August 7, 2010. It is 20 chapters and 125 pages. I wrote NAME to pay my rent.”
John Dermot Woods is doing the cover art!
Here’s an excerpt:
He stood for just a moment, contemplating the thing that was coming. He didn’t have to do it, didn’t have to come to the girl in the red bikini and call to her. He didn’t have to listen to the voice inside her head, sounding so much like the slosh of the sea, like the spitting of blood in her throat, the inside voice that would tell him her name.
As he approached, her pink toes curled into the wet sand, he trained his mind to hers, narrowing his attention to dive below the surface of her dampened hair, into the twirled sea of her thought. He slipped into her mind like a man dropping into a nighttime wave, soundless and effortless, looking for a pearl tumbled in dark water. He swam there for only a moment, grasping the dark and shining word, Jennifer, before coming to the surface with it: Jennifer.
As he came near her, her arms settled loosely across her bikini top, he called that name. “Jennifer,” he said, waving. “Hello.”
The girl, her red bikini flashing in the dark, her hair tumbled in a curl of waves above her eyes, turned toward him. Her own name in the throat of a strange boy didn’t startle her. She opened, arms falling away from her chest, the now unprotected skin of her belly, her throat.
PW Under-rated writers list
In response to the Huffington Post’s over-rated writers list, PW makes an under-rated writers list. On Jesus Angel Garcia‘s FB page, there’s a discussion going on exactly what makes a writer under-rated. I mean, come on: Tao Lin is on the list, along with the likes of Deborah Eisenberg (a Guggenheim fellowship, three O’Henry’s, a MacArthur, etc.), Mary Gaitskill (been in Nyer, Harper’s, Esquire, etc), and Donald Antrim (finalist for a PEN/Faulker, frequent NYer contributor, etc), all writers I would say have received ample attention. If this is what it takes to be under-rated, what does someone have to do to be over-rated? (Don’t answer that. I already know the answer: be Jonathan Safron Foer or Junot Diaz.) To be fair, there are also some truly under-rated writers on their list. What do you think?
Interview with Cool Famous Hot Literary Agent Erin Hosier
http://htmlgiant.com/q-a/interview-with-cool-famous-hot-literary-agent-erin-hosier/
Hey. I interviewed Erin Hosier. She’s a literary agent to a couple of fiction writers (Shya Scanlon, Brad Listi) and a lot of memoirists. Okay. I have a doctor’s appointment soon. I think that there is something wrong with me. Interview.
You mostly represent non-fiction writers, but a few fiction writers too, right? What kind of fiction manuscripts catch your eye? Do you want fiction that resembles memoir?
You should ask me more glamorous questions, like what kind of shampoo I use, or who my favorite designers are. I currently represent four literary fiction writers: Paul Jaskunas, Edan Lepucki, Brad Listi, and Shya Scanlon. I represent more illustrators than fiction writers. And more rock stars. Furthermore, these four writers are very different from each other, but I expect great things from each of them. I have represented other fiction writers over the years, but fiction writers tend to switch agents when I can’t sell their work. This is why I don’t handle more of it. My strengths are in writing, editing and pitching non-fiction. That’s my comfort zone. I even prefer documentaries to other movies, and I see way more movies than read books. Also, I’m a slow reader, and fiction comes in long manuscripts. I’ve noticed too that even if a novel is brilliant in so many ways – it makes you laugh or cry or it haunts your dreams or makes you look at the world in a new way, if it entertains – but it has just ONE fatal flaw in the marketing or manuscript department, it’s not going to sell.
82 Comments
August 10th, 2010 / 12:39 pm
August 10th, 2010 / 12:39 pm
Two little pieces
Literature is a college party: throw in enough depressed people with personality disorders, and someone is bound to get laid. At around 11PM, the bad boys enter, high on red-bull and vodka. I miss the days of Hemingway or Bukowski, where manly self-destruction came from self-hatred and happened before the photo shoot. If James Frey, per the constant middle-fingered vector of his “fuck you,” is today’s “bad boy” (sorry Bret Easton Ellis, your suit’s too good), then we have lost the battle of soul grasping. Of course, he’s just operating off of the fake memoir public image disaster — but I just worry about someone, anyone, who engages with the world, a world in which one has acquired moderate success and comfort, with such affected and insincere hostility. I find Sartre’s 1964 Nobel Prize decline a much more compelling “fuck you”; that, or a gunshot to the head. Frey will be just fine. I’d like to think, save those two little fleshy spears, he’s just reaching out for a hug.
Inception in 3 Seconds
[via @Idea Shower, typo notwithstanding]
[I remember an interview somewhere with Quentin Tarantino where he dismantled Nolan’s Memento in one question: if he can’t remember anything, how does he remember he has a memory problem?]
[While I’m at it: A.D. Jameson’s 17 Ways of Criticizing Inception is slick.]