What I couldn’t understand, though, was why they killed the story. Sure, it wasn’t Blackwater, but this was a store that at least half our readers’ kids would have killed to work for, and it was being run by some racist, frat-boy cult, and the suburban teenagers it hired and fired so mercurially were going to grow into adults who thought this was . . . normal? That in the modern American workplace, this sort of Lord-of-the-Flies management strategy was just par for the fucking course?

The two versions of his novel “The Getaway” — Peckinpah’s in 1972 and Roger Donaldson’s 1994 remake — are notoriously watered down and leave out the book’s most interesting feature: an ending in which the two central characters, a bank robber and his wife, descend into a physical and spiritual hell. Indeed.  I always wondered why they left out the best and most bizarre part, when the protagonists go to a fabled Mexican haven for criminals and find it’s a nightmarish semi-fascist enclave (surprise!).  I love Jim Thompson, have loved him since I was ten or eleven.  The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, Savage Night.  Interested to see Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of The Killer Inside Me, which provoked lots of disgusted walkouts at Sundance.  Trailer looks good.

The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. (from an article titled Memory Is Fiction)

HEY NEW YORK- Tomorrow is the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe Street Fair. It’ll be going all day (10a-6p) with free live music and lots of really cheap books. Last year (six months ago? whenever it was–last time) I got The Oxford Book of Letters, edited by Frank Kermode and his wife, for a dollar. But don’t worry, they’ll also have books that real people actually want, and those books will be a dollar each, too. Plus clothing, records, savory meats, and more. Full details here.

Super Funny True Apocalyptic-Minded Banter with Gary Shteyngart

Correspondent: Super Sad Love Story is your final book.

Shteyngart: Super Sad…True.

Correspondent: Yes, I know. It has too many modifiers.

Shteyngart: Oh my God! Modify this! This is definitely it. I’m hanging up my gloves and I’m becoming a duck farmer in Maine.

(Read more here at Ed Champion’s blog. I love that guy.)

Hive of Nerves.

Does anyone like to edit their work intoxicated (not, not, not write–edit!)?

1. 1st issue of adjnoun comes in a ltd ed of 200, letterpressed and wild with Ohle, Markus, Lopez, myself, some other freaks.
2. Pitchfork runs an article I actually liked reading, on “drag”.
3. Heather Christle be tweeting for the month of June for @harriet_poetry.

For fiction, I read the Introduction after I’ve finished the book. They should go afterwards, like an Afterword. That way, I read the book fresh. That way, my reading isn’t tainted by someone else’s interpretation.