They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but can you judge a country by the kind of covers it puts on its books? We’ve always found the cover changes between US and UK editions of the same books pretty interesting – they must be reflective of our different cultures in some way incomprehensible to us. After all, book jacket designers are trying to capture the attention and imagination of their target populace, so it’s fascinating to see what the experts think will attract a Brit versus what they think might attract an American. Inspired by the annual US vs UK book cover comparison of Rooster contenders over at The Millions, we decided to make a list of our own, comparing the covers of our favorite books from last year — and, just for fun, a few of our favorite books from years past. Click through to see the comparisons and our picks for the winners, and let us know what you think in the comments!
Wooing is hard work. Inevitably all of us will be crushed by disappointment from time to time when a chosen paramour rejects us with a single, cutting remark. However, we are almost certain here at Flavorpill that having a background in literature will work in your favor, whether you find yourself pining at a bar, a café, or at an awkward house party filled with graduate students clutching red plastic cups — their eyes glazing over as another person enters the throng and attempts to discuss his thesis on Levinas’s idea of irreducible relations. Rally against this stagnation, readers, and use the quotes below to find love… but don’t blame us if you get slapped.
Now that it’s the end of the year, there are a million suggested reading lists out there — including a fewfromus. So with such an overwhelming array of choices, how’s an aspiring literary hipster to know which books are most important in terms of general knowing-it-all-ness? Like last year, we decided to go straight to the source, and to that end, we’ve collected a few of our favorite and most knowledgeable lit-hipsters’ own hit lists for your cred-building convenience. Click through and enjoy!
Call it society’s weirdest guilty pleasure, but lately it seems like there are more apocalyptic fantasies than those of the fairytale variety. From zombies to pandemics, tyrannical dictatorships to machine takeovers — and plenty of foreboding real world disasters to color in the cracks — there’s no shortage of dystopian futures to choose from. With Gary Shteyngart’s newest contribution to the genre, Super Sad True Love Story, out later this month, we got to thinking about the doomsday options we have to look forward to. So take control of humanity’s bleak horizon by figuring out which hellish future is best for you — because if there’s anything we’ve learned from dystopian literature, it’s that your preferences matter. Or, not.
Between his art projects, his stint on General Hospital, and his newfound literary career (oh yeah, and his highly successful film work…), James Franco is constantly all over the news. Just today, we read about him starring in a book trailer and bringing Jeffrey Deitch along for the second round of his magical GH adventure. Considering that he’s got hands in cinema, literature, TV, and visual arts, we’re going to go ahead and crown Franco the new King of All Media. So, how did he come to dominate the news cycle? Perhaps it has something to do with folks he’s chosen to collaborate with, befriend, or simply name check. After the jump, we look back at the 10 people we think have been most influential in boosting Franco-mania to unprecedented levels.
“Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off.”
It got us thinking about our own favorite beginnings, both recent and classic. Below are some favorites from our bookshelf. Feel free to add your own picks in the comments section.
Best commentary on “post-blackness” considering Obama wasn’t even president when the book was written:
“You would think they’d be used to me by now. I mean don’t they know that after fourteen hundred years the charade of blackness is over? That we blacks, the once eternally hip, the people who were as right now as Greenwich Mean Time, are, as of today, as yesterday as stone tools, the velocipede, and the paper straw all rolled into one? The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so.”
Here’s a challenge: Can you identify some of contemporary literature’s most famous voices from just six words of their life story? We’ve pulled some of our favorite pithy memoirs from It All Changed in an Instant (SMITH Magazine’s new sequel to Not Quite What I Was Planning), and blacked out the attribution to make things interesting. If you’re feeling stumped, don’t feel bad (and look at the tags on this post for hints), some of them are deceptively simple.
So would you believe me anyway? – James Frey
Heart fattens, skin thins. Who knew? – Sloane Crosley
It may not be the Nobel Prize, but the competition for this year’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award is just as stiff (cringe — pun intended). Philip Roth is on the Literary Review’s shortlist, and he’s in good company — current nominees include Amos Oz, Nick Cave, and John Banville, while past candidates include such literary giants as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Tom Wolfe. Now in its 17th year, fiction’s most notorious honor was dreamed up by Auberon Waugh (Evelyn’s son) “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing, or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.”
We’ve heard that nobody reads anymore. In fact, during his reading at this year’s New Yorker Festival, Gary Shteyngart described his upcoming novel as a view of a futuristic, totally illiterate New York — “So, next Tuesday,” he quipped. Ouch. Here at Flavorpill, we know that a healthy dose of legitimate literature is essential to offset all the tweeting and Facebooking we do every day, so fight the good fight and read something. Stephen King’s new short story, “Premium Harmony,” for example.
When Love is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts turned up at Flavorpill HQ, we were excited to read lovelorn tales from great writers like Wendy McClure, Kate Christensen, Gary Shteyngart, Junot Diaz, and Jami Attenberg, among others. Here’s a line or two from each of their stories. To find out who’s who, follow the jump.
1. “It took two cities for us to break up. I began the process during a visit to Naples, we took our plight onto the Eurostar train to Rome, and it ended there.”
2. “In the first three months you break up with him a few times for no particular reason. This is what you do, what you have always done.” Read More »
, out later this month, we got to thinking about the doomsday options we have to look forward to. So take control of humanity’s bleak horizon by figuring out which hellish future is best for you — because if there’s anything we’ve learned from dystopian literature, it’s that your preferences matter. Or, not.
by Paul Beatty
(SMITH Magazine’s new sequel to 
), and blacked out the attribution to make things interesting. If you’re feeling stumped, don’t feel bad (and look at the tags on this post for hints), some of them are deceptively simple.
