All you struggling artists and writers out there, take heart. It may seem like you’re just spinning your wheels at that random job you got walking dogs/painting fences/selling umbrellas on the corner, but you could find your inspiration for the Next Great American Novel at any moment. Or, think of it this way: one day you’ll get to talk about whatever you’re doing now as a charming aside in interviews with the New York Times. After all, from pirating to condom sales to modeling, many of the most famous authors in American history had a few pretty weird day jobs to pay the bills before they hit the big time, and we don’t know about you, but we find that to be a comforting thought. Click through to see some of the strangest day jobs of beloved authors before they were famous, and then get back to work.
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If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: Josef K.
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We don’t know about you, but it’s not too often that we stop to look at a dust jacket in its entirety, and as we’ve come to discover, that is a shame. Earlier this week, Dangerous Minds tipped us off to Facsimile Dust Jackets, a veritable treasure trove of beautiful, fully unfurled (flaps and all!) vintage jackets from almost 8,000 books. As an added bonus, you can also buy the prints from the website. It’s interesting the way the oft-maligned or merely informational back cover of a book coordinates (or doesn’t) with the front, and we’re thinking we’ll be pulling the paper off a lot more of our novels in the future, just for a good look-see. Click through to see some of our favorites from Facsimile Dust Jackets, and head on over there to peruse their stash for yourself!
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Alexander Maksik’s new novel, You Deserve Nothing, is set in Paris and involves a dashing, charismatic teacher of romantic and existentialist authors who ends up starting a forbidden affair with one of his students. We thought he would be the perfect candidate to curate a list of 10 existential novels and one easily guessable play.
Maksik writes, “In the popular imagination, Existentialism is inextricable from left bank Paris café life – black turtlenecks, Les Deux Magots, Jean-Paul Sartre – but what I think of as the first great work of Existentialist fiction was written before Paris was even an idea. The Book of Job, the story of a man who suffers endlessly for no reason other than God’s whim. When Job has had enough and finally demands some explanation, God arrives and says, I’m paraphrasing here, Hey, did you make the world? No? Then sit down and shut up. Which is the biblical version of ‘because I’m the adult, I make the rules.’ So, in one way or another, the following novels all have their protagonists moving through similarly chaotic and unjust worlds, where there is no perfect logic, where there is no absolute morality, or reason and they are left to determine their own meaning in absurd and meaningless universes.”
If you’re in New York on September 10th, head over to Bar 82 for a round of Existentialist Trivia with Maksik. As always, send us your thoughts on classic existentialist texts in the comments section below.
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Last month, we ran a highly contentious list of disturbing novels and short stories, from Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 classic, “A Good Man is Hard To Find,” to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. This month, we’ve combed through the comments in order to find our favorite disturbing book suggestions from readers who had a bone to pick with our original choices. The following list contains an assortment of writers from our fair nation as well as a few key stories from abroad, and all of the stories included are guaranteed to disturb. An especially well-read commenter suggested the surreal poetic novel/poem Les Chants de Maldoror, which offers the following warning to readers: “The lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve his soul as water does sugar.” So get ready to toss and turn tonight, because these books are meant to unsettle.
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A couple weeks ago, we read a wonderful essay over at The Millions in which the author dissected the feeling of reading a Great Big Important Novel — versus, say, a Slim Prestige Novel — suggesting that part of what we love about a GBIN comes from a sort of literary Stockholm Syndrome, a somewhat sick scrounging for brief moments of kindness between hundreds of punishing pages. This may be so, though there is something inherently satisfying and unrelated to prestige about sinking into a novel that is long enough to become your companion for weeks or months, and we’ve always been sorry when a wonderful (and wonderfully long) book is finally over. Fair warning: your author is one who cannot bear to leave a book (any book) unfinished after reaching the point of no return at about page twenty, and considering this, it seems helpful to dissect the merits of the long versus the short in the oeuvres of particular authors, so we can all make informed decisions whether to imprison ourselves within the pages of a doorstop or breezily choose the shorter version. Click through to see our picks for the long versus the short of some of our favorite authors, and let us know whether you agree in the comments!
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As any true Joyce fan knows, Bloomsday is fast approaching, and this year, thanks to Twitter, there will be a new way to celebrate. One dedicated fan has launched a project entitled “Ulysses Meets Twitter 2011.” On June 16th, volunteers will tweet 140-character-sized chunks of Joyce’s experimental novel every 15 minutes. The project got us thinking about all the distinct voices in Ulysses, which led to some daydreaming about book characters we’d be curious to see on Twitter. After the jump, check out the literary characters we’d love to follow — and be sure to leave your own suggestions in the comments.
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Today in things that are absurdly relevant to our interests: Illustrator Chet Phillips uses the program Painter to create animal portraits that range from Sinister Simians to Wrestle Pets. But, predictably enough, we have fallen in love with Phillips’s Literary Pets series, which transforms dozens of famous authors, from the Middle Ages through the present, into cats and dogs. Meet Oscar Wildecat, Dorothy Purrker, Joyce Feral Oates, and their four-legged friends after the jump, then click over to Etsy to buy an affordable print and see even more images from the series. For the indecisive among us, there are even two decks of Literary Pets trading cards.
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Food and wine pairings are old hat. Sure, there are some sommeliers that agonize over whether which notes go best with which sauces, and while our tummies sure appreciate their work, all we know is that fish goes with white wine and fava beans go with a nice chianti. But we think food and books go pretty well together. At least all of this writer’s childhood books are full of crumbs from a decade of eating and reading, the right hand pages tucked underneath the plate for safekeeping. And if you’re going to snack during storytime, you should probably eat something that goes with your reading material, whether it enhances the experience or just helps you make it through to the end. Click through for our expert list of essential food and literature pairings, perfect for your next nerdy themed dinner party – or just your average Sunday night at home.
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Here at Flavorwire, we love book covers. We’re also nerds, so we totally dig typography. So obviously, we really love awesome typography on book covers. And with our typographic book jacket alphabet, we can spell words with our books! What’s better than that? Click through for a (mostly) complete A-Z in book cover typography, and if you can think of any for the letters we’ve missed, let us know in the comments!
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