Literary Review, a British monthly publication, does its best to alleviate the pains caused by all the cringe-inducing, overwrought, or just plain gross sex scenes that appear in the pages of the world’s most acclaimed novels. Each year it hands out a Bad Sex Award to a novelist who rendered that sacred sensual act laughably Read More
A few days after being deservedly dubbed a “genius,” newly minted Macarthur Fellow Yiyun Li, whose recent short story collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, has been excerpted in the New Yorker (she’s one of the much-envied 20 under 40), told a gathering at the Asian American Writers Workshop Read More
“Your voice,” Simon Cowell says to a singer in a story from Ben Greenman’s latest collection Celebrity Chekhov. “It rattles like a pan under a car. What is Bono going to think when you take his song and treat it like an advertising jingle? I would be surprised if you are here a week from Read More
The Swedish Academy announced this morning that Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa will be the 2010 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In a statement on its website, the academy said they decided to award Llosa for his “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and Read More
The saga of Jonathan Franzen’s stolen glasses has come to its appropriate end: the man who took the Freedom author’s glasses hostage Monday night has come forward and identified himself. James Fletcher, a 27-year-old student at Imperial College London, detailed the full narrative of his eyewear-snatching to GQ UK, and the tale Read More
With just a few days until the Swedish Academy announces the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the betting odds determined by gambling site Ladbrokes.com have experienced quite the shakeup. Cormac McCarthy has seen his chances to snag the prize shoot up from 66 to 1 all Read More
Get your bets in, literary gamblers: the Swedish Academy has settled on a winner for the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, according to the AP. The Academy will be announcing the recipients of the other Nobel categories starting on Monday, but it will deprive us of the winner in literature until the Read More
“Jersey Shore” starlet Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi will be taking her Garden State experiences and turning them into a memoir, Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books announced today.
It will be called “A Shore Thing,” and its mission is to reinforce the foul-mouthed and aggressive (but charming) man-seeking personality she has cultivated on the MTV reality show. A Read More
Are you a Truman Capote obsessive with a casual $35,000 lying around? Already own first editions of all the cherished effete Southern writer’s works, but just need that one artifact to complete your collection? Well, look no further: AbeBooks is selling the only existing birth certificate of the Breakfast at Tiffany’s author.
Issued by the Parish Read More
Today is “Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day,” a date when the world is asked to plead with God to heal Christopher Hitchens from esophageal cancer. There is, however, a slight rub in this otherwise lovely plan: Hitch, as you would know if you’ve tuned in to any of his recent videos and articles in which he Read More
