Entertainment - Tuesday, March 31, 2009 11:24 - 0 Comments
Toni Morrison Wins a Live Cock
Today showed the championship match in the 2009 Tournament of Books, a bracket-style competition with the best 16 novels of the last year – not unlike something we did last semester.
This is the fifth year The Morning News has held this glorious competition, which is judged by readers and all sorts of literary people, including wonderboy Junot Diaz, who won last year.
From the TOB website:
“We mention this because the Tournament of Books is one of those concepts that only could have been conceived and subsequently executed by people who used to drink a lot but now drink considerably less. In the absence of too much alcohol, it never would have occurred to us that we should take 16 of the most celebrated and highly touted novels of the year, seed them in a March Madness-type bracket, conscript them into a “Battle Royale of Literary Excellence,” and, in honor of David Sedaris’s brother, present the author of the winning book a live rooster.”
Toni Morrison’s A Mercy came out on top this year, winning over Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge. The big question is: what will she do with her newly gained live rooster? Eat it? Keep it as a pet? Kill it and stuff it as an eternal trophy of her success?
Image from The Morning News
Entertainment - Tuesday, December 9, 2008 12:12 - 2 Comments
Michael Phelps is Probably the Next Barack Obama
At least in terms of writing uplifting books and having enough fans to win high office.
Today, Phelps will be in our Big Apple supporting his latest work of literary non-fiction, No Limits: The Will to Succeed, which the New York Review of Books called a “salacious hybrid of Infinite Jest and 1960s Norman Mailer, with a dash of Marquez’s flair for the supernatural.”
But really. The winningest Olympian of all time will be at Barnes & Noble tonight at 7:30 p.m. for a free, all ages reading in which a third grader will likely have to narrate due to the big ol’ words Phelps’ ghostwriter snuck in there. Don’t miss it. Oh, and buy the book or the terrorists win.
Entertainment - Tuesday, November 25, 2008 17:35 - 4 Comments
Junot Díaz and Samuel R. Delaney Read at NYC’s Solas
In the middle of the throng at Solas last night, I was listening to Samuel R. Delaney, the former sci-fi writer and all time polymath, read a preposterous molestation scene from his latest, Dark Reflections, when I heard the thump of a head against either the bar or the floor as its owner lost consciousness.
“Someone call 911!” someone shouted.
Delaney, a veteran of perilously over-crowded, jungle-aired literary events, kept reading in his strange, somehow soothing, completely ignorable, rising and retreating cadence, and the woman quickly recovered. It was the heat and maybe the booze—not Delaney’s story “about a black, gay, poet who lived in this area” (lower Manhattan)—that caused it. Not to harp on Delaney, but it was nothing to fall down about. He’s best know for his science fiction, work which even Díaz says “drove [him] in part to be a writer.”
Solas had it set up so that Díaz and Delaney each read twice, once upstairs and once downstairs because they didn’t have enough space. Díaz came up just as the paramedics were leaving with the (perfectly fine) girl and said, “Let’s do this thing.” Continue…
Entertainment - Thursday, November 13, 2008 10:00 - 5 Comments
“Oscar Wao” Is For You, You and Yunior
Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been the biggest critical success of the year, but if you’re into reading books for the sheer fun of it, that shouldn’t stop you from picking it up. If you were only going to read one book that came out in 2008, Oscar has my recommendation and a good portion of the NYU Local administration’s as well. As Lily Q put it to me, “I would have that man’s babies… and I don’t even like baldies.”
Díaz’s prose is keen and flexible, erudite but down to earth. As you may have gathered from his recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Díaz is unassuming, and the book reflects the philosophy of writing he explained to the LAist. “Being against a language form is just as absurd as Canute the Beast trying to order or command the sea.” He’s an all inclusive writer “looking for excuses to deploy all sorts of language.” He employs a compelling array of characters to fit the bill. Continue…
Entertainment, Featured - Wednesday, October 22, 2008 13:04 - 13 Comments
Are All Authors Assholes? Probably.
I had to read A Moveable Feast for my literature class recently and I accidentally fell in love with Ernest Hemingway without understanding the implications. Such are the ways of the heart. Upon hearing of my new found affair, my mother put it bluntly: How can a feminist like you read—and love—work by someone who was such a misogynistic prick?
Good question, Mom. Continue…
National - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 12:00 - 1 Comment
Even Those who Frequent NobelPrize.org Haven’t Read Clézio
So, have you read anything by this year’s Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio? Well, neither have 87% of the over 7,000 surveyors who responded to a poll on the Nobel’s own website.
Continue…
