Hunter S. Thompson and the Sanity of Writers A short appreciation of writer Hunter S. Thompson, who often claimed to have done much of his writing “half out of his skull,” under the influence of drugs and alcohol. This link is worth clicking just to see the illustrations. THE GENERATION THAT GREW UP ON STEPHEN […]
I’ve come across lots of interesting stuff lately. When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life I’m including this article on all my blogs this week because it’s important that everyone with any online presence, no matter how small, read it. 50 MUST-READ CONTEMPORARY ESSAY COLLECTIONS From Book Riot’s Liberty Hardy: To prove that there
The Classics Spin #18 I love these Classics Spins because they get me reading the books on my list when I might otherwise avoid them. Here’s how it works: I list 20 books here that I have yet to read from my original list of 50+ classics. On Wednesday, August 1, the Classics Club will
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The title page for an unpublished manuscript related to Malcolm X’s autobiography, one of several long-rumored fragments that were sold on Thursday.CreditJeenah Moon for The New York Times By Jennifer Schuessler July 26, 2018 16 For a quarter century, they have been the stuff of myth among scholars: three missing chapters from “The Autobiography of
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What I’ve been reading around the web recently. Can Reading Make You Happier? An interesting history of bibliotherapy, or the use of reading to help “people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence.” For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading
100 Books to Read Before You Die When you find yourself not knowing what book to pick up next, here’s a list that contains “a mix of modern fiction, true stories, and timeless classics.” The deep roots of writing Was writing invented for accounting and administration or did it evolve from religious movements, sorcery and
John Irving, The Art of Fiction No. 93 I’m not a twentieth-century novelist, I’m not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I’m old-fashioned, a storyteller. I’m not an analyst and I’m not an intellectual. WHICH BOOKS DO
The HBO adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel Sharp Objects begins tonight (July 8, 2018). “To me,” she says, “Sharp Objects is a Western. The gunslinger goes back to his town to discover it’s been taken over by the bad guys. And she’s gotta get rid of all the bad stuff. The gunslinger who’s arrived to
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Internet reading that caught my eye over the past week. Megan Abbott’s Bloodthirsty Murderesses The thriller writer probes the psychological underpinnings of female rage. Because, Abbott says, “girls are darker than boys.” New Black Gothic Sheri-Marie Harrison, associate professor of English at the University of Missouri, explains what she calls the new black Gothic in
These are the stories from the internet that piqued my interest over the last week. Why We Don’t Read, Revisited Caleb Crain, in a follow-up to a decade-old report on Americans’ reading habits, reports that the time Americans spend reading continues to decline. “Television, rather than the Internet, likely remains the primary force distracting Americans
