Never mind the lack of clean drinking water; you’re liberated!
According to the L.A. Times, the U.S. military secretly pays the Iraqi press to run stories written by American troops that put a positive spin on the U.S. mission in Iraq.
Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work [...]
The green fairy
For our anniversary, Mr. Maud has arranged to encourage my degeneracy. You’ve gotta love a man who gives you exactly what you want — and throws in some magic spray (inspired by these pills?).
Sporadic posting will continue, and not just because of the controlled substances. Work is busy; about forty-seven friends are [...]
Writers in the sack
The Bad Sex in Fiction longlist is out, and the Guardian posts the contenders. This year we have auto-flowering nipples, glazed genitals, a demon eel orgasm, and heartwarming coitus(?) involving a lobster.
No wonder they say the novel is dead.
Crews adaptation selected for Sundance
The Hawk is Dying, based on the novel by Harry Crews, premieres next year at Sundance. Directed by Julian Goldberger, and written by Crews and Goldberger, the film centers on “a Gainesville, Fla., man who tries to alter his life as an auto upholsterer by training a wild, red-tailed hawk.” The cast includes [...]
Prison to library
Although I work less than fifteen minutes away by foot, I’d never visited the NYPL’s Jefferson Market Branch Library until a few weekends ago, when a friend wanted to pick up some books she’d reserved.
It’s a gorgeous building — the spiral staircase especially — but the history of the place is more riveting [...]
On the Times‘ notable books list
The New York Times: “A Family Newspaper?”
Fate of unpublished Nabokov manuscript uncertain
Ron Rosenbaum reports on a “dire new twist in the fate of The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov’s last unpublished manuscript,” which “exists now in a safe-deposit box whose location is known to only two people.”
“If what I’ve just learned is true,” he says, “it’s likely never to see the light of day — [...]
Aggregator
If you spend your workday shuttling between book blogs and haven’t gotten comfortable with an RSS reader like Bloglines, MetaxuCafe could come in handy.
Bring the flashlight
The unparalleled Pasha Malla has had some bad sex.
Have you seen the movie version of High Fidelity? Remember that part when the girl’s dad or someone dies and all she wants to do is screw? Picture that, except think Linda Blair in The Exorcist meets the Tasmanian Devil meets Traci Lords after six years of [...]
Why I never write about the South: a guest dispatch from Robb Forman Dew
Robb Forman Dew is known for writing novels set in the Midwest. Her latest, the subtle and well-regarded The Truth of the Matter (excerpted in the weekend’s New York Times Book Review), takes place in Washburn, Ohio.
I met Dew this fall and was surprised to hear what I thought was a trace of [...]
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please submit details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the date of the [...]
Another blissfully parent-free holiday
Between today’s site outage (thanks to the misleadingly named Dreamhost) and the rush to leave town, the blogging day was shot.
I’m up at my sister’s for Thanksgiving. We’ll observe it in the usual way, and since we follow the Antigeist’s rules on the proper time to start boozing — “one may always choose [...]
Remainders: then and now edition
Gore Vidal barely recalls writing a re-discovered story based on a Tennessee Williams anecdote. (The above photo of the two men was taken in Rome in 1948. Vidal is on the right.)
The formidable Dame Muriel Spark, best known as the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962), has made the IMPAC longlist [...]
Hackery of the best quality
Jody Rosen sums up David Brooks’ career in sixteen words: “None of this qualifies as journalistic malfeasance, exactly…. But it’s hackery of a pretty high order.”
Strategies for improving a lousy Scrabble game
Maybe if I played Scrabble Graham Greene’s way, I wouldn’t hate it so much.
The playwright Michael Meyer travelled around the world with Greene in the 1950s. Greene had promised opium-smoking and other tropical decadences, so Meyer was disappointed to find that Greene had packed a portable Scrabble board. The nightly Scrabble games almost ruined their [...]