Writing about sex in literature is a difficult task; there are so many ways authors can go wrong. Nowadays, most writers spend too much time on the build up and then release the curtain during the show, choosing instead to segue to a point immediately after the act. Others spend an inordinate amount of energy coming up with penis euphemisms, and end up ruining a scene (think: late John Updike), or even a whole novel. Evelyn Waugh’s son, Auberon, established the Bad Sex in Fiction Award 17 years ago for this very reason. He wanted to “gently dissuad[e] authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing, or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.” Rowan Somerville was the 2010 winner for some godawful passages in his second novel, The Shape of Her. Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, was also nominated, as was Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross.
To counter this terrible scourge on contemporary readers, here is a list of noteworthy sex scenes in modern literature not by a Great Male Novelist (e.g., Mailer, Roth, or Updike) — those supposed masters of the form.
Read More »
Today at Flavorpill, we wondered what Glee star Lea Michele was doing on the red carpet wearing a dress made out of super-absorbent quilted paper towels. We read a fantastic new short story by George Saunders in The New Yorker. We learned that what we’ve always referred to as a pound sign is actually an octothorpe. We liked this list of 10 mind-blowing Easter eggs hidden in famous albums. We watched every zombie death from The Walking Dead compressed into 69 seconds. We were glad to see Make Me a Woman by Vanessa Davis on this list of the top 10 comics of 2010. We saw what’s left behind when Art Basel is over. We looked at some rather intense ice skating faces. We met Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of many of Nintendo’s top games. And finally, we were impressed by Crushable’s gallery of stars who resemble famous paintings — particularly Tilda Swinton as the Mona Lisa.
Genius satirist George Saunders is by no means new to awards. With both the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim Fellowships under his belt, it comes as no surprise that Saunders’ short story, “Victory Lap,” which is about the kidnapping of a teenage girl, grabbed a nod for ASME’s 2010 National Magazine Awards in its fiction category yesterday. Originally published in The New Yorker on October 5th, 2009, the story toys with perspective, channeling the voices of three distinctive characters.
Read More »
Sam Lipsyte’s new book The Ask
is a riotous, devilish look at a middle-aged slacker trying to pull his life back together. Clearly, we loved it, and while interviewing him, sheepishly (and nerdily) quoted Lolita to describe his prose style: we told him it’s like reading a “lavish epileptic fit.” How else can you describe language that manages to be nasty, hilarious, and tender all at once — and often in exuberant bursts? That’s what we thought.
The novel also transmits a very strong sense of place, so this past weekend, Sam agreed to take us on a walking tour of his old neighborhood in Astoria (he now teaches at Columbia and lives on the Upper West Side), which functions as the setting for much of the book, and the place in which Milo (the aforementioned slacker) lives. Discussed on the way: Hitler-loving Czechs, Mary Karr, awkward sex, Barry Hannah, the hostile takeover of land by the “me’s,” Ben Marcus, epic beer gardens, unironic hipsters, Padgett Powell, ways to make money in the park, Keith Gessen, pickup football, George Saunders, the boring shit, and Deb Olin Unferth, among other things. Hit the pavement after the jump.
Read More »
Last week, in an effort to ease your holiday shopping, we offered you our list of the 10 best books for non-readers. But what about books for readers? Even if you’re a class-A literary nerd, it can be hard to figure out what the other bookworms in your life would like best. To make matters worse, there’s no room for slacking — giving the perfect book to the perfect person shows just how well you know them and can also give them a little insight into you, so you want to make sure you do it right.
To help you out, here are our suggestions — great books for Mom, Dad, your brothers and sisters, your best friend and your significant other — all guaranteed to please.
Read More »
Forget all this talk about the death of print media for a moment. Tomorrow a newspaper is born in San Francisco. Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, old-fashioned broadsheet — the San Francisco Panorama. Its pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. Here’s what this beautiful beast will cover: “It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more.”
Exciting and ambitious for an 11-year-old literary journal, right? That’s why we sat down with Oscar Villalon, McSweeney’s publisher, to get the back story on the project.
Read More »
“It was a lunchtime auction of Local Celebrities, a Local Celebrity being any sucker dopey enough to answer ‘Yes’ when the Chamber of Commerce asked, ‘Willing to participate in community antidrug effort Celebrity Auction event tentatively entitled Boys of Summer?’”
– A snippet from George Saunders’ hilarious new fiction in this week’s New Yorker, a piece which makes us realize that it’s well worth enduring a few Paris Hiltons in this world in the interest of preserving celebrity culture at the local level. If you’ve got a favorite hometown personality [ours is, and will always be, Pat Kiernan], do tell us about them in the comments.
When we heard that Chuck Klosterman’s road-trip memoir Killing Yourself To Live would be coming to the big screen soon, we were careful not to get too excited. Sure, some of our favorite journalist narratives have been successfully adapted into masterpieces, like Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, which became Adaptation, or even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But others, like this year’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, get Hollywood-ized with characters that never existed and none of the first-person drivel we liked about them in the first place.
Which brings us back to Klosterman — he’s no Hunter S. Tompson, but his account of his magical music mystery tour is complicated and dark, and we’d hate to see it transformed into a crappy buddy-road-trip comedy.
After the jump, we make casting suggestions for Killing Yourself to Live and suggest other non-fiction classics we’d like to see turned into good movies.
Read More »
