1. MGMT‘s upcoming sophomore release, Congratulations, which isn’t due out until April 13, leaked over the weekend. As a result, the band is now streaming it here. [via Vulture]
2. Rumor is that Parks and Recreation‘s Aziz Ansari is in final talks to host the 2010 MTV Movie Awards. [via EW]
3. When Showtime’s Nurse Jackie returns for a second season this month, Dr. Cooper will be tweeting in character and in real time from @DoctorCoop. [via NYT]
4. A new Joyce Carol Oates short story from the latest issue of the New Yorker is online for your reading pleasure.
5. Did you see Michelle Obama‘s cameo on last night’s episode of The Simpsons? The character was voiced by none other than Angela Bassett. (video) [via HuffPo]
Bonus link: An interview with Jonathan Lethem‘s Second Life avatar
Earlier in March, word of the literary archives of the late David Foster Wallace landing at the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin caused considerable fanfare, for understandable reasons. Now fans and scholars — not to mention biographers — would have a chance to delve inside the working mind of the author of Infinite Jest (who committed suicide at the age of 46 in 2008) and pore over notes, an eclectic book collection, letters to and from noted literary colleagues like Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen, and course syllabi for the many classes Wallace taught over a decade and a half, most recently as a tenured (and highly-regarded) professor of English Literature at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
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The Millions recently posted the very Shteyngart-y opening passage of Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming novel, Super Sad True Love Story
.
“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.
1. Slumberland
by Paul Beatty
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.”
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As The Millions noted in its 2010 book preview, the theme for the upcoming year (and beyond) seems to be posthumous publication: Roberto Bolaño, Ralph Ellison, Stieg Larsson, and David Foster Wallace — the dead gang’s all here! (OK, so technically DFW’s The Pale King isn’t meant to come out until 2011, but we couldn’t leave him out.) That said, there’s plenty of good stuff to look forward to from the living as well. After the jump, we reveal the books that we’re most excited about reading in the coming months — and tell you about a few that we’ve already devoured.
Be sure to leave your own suggestions in the comments.
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The Thing Quarterly is more akin to a conceptual art project than a scholarly publication, as the tag “Quarterly” may imply, though contributors like writer Jonathan Lethem give the objects in question a distinctly literary bent. In Issue No. 7, Lethem partners with former Jack Spade designer Matt Singer and Selima Salaun of Selima Optique to release the “Chaldron Optical System” onto an unsuspecting public, a public soon to be enlightened in the ways of the chaldron thanks to Lethem’s forthcoming novel Chronic City. (The “Chaldron Optical System” being a lovely set of black spectacles with custom text on both arms, encased in a royal blue case with a user’s manual in both English and français.) We speak to Lethem about African ants, Perkus Tooth, and the mysterious chaldrons after the jump. Read More »
Bullocks Wilshire, photo credit: Catherine Corman
Catherine Corman‘s October 31 release Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City
takes readers on a black and white tour of fictional private eye Philip Marlowe‘s real world haunts. As Jonathan Lethem says in his intro the book,
“If architecture is fate, then it is Marlowe’s fate to enumerate the pensive dooms of Los Angeles, the fatal, gorgeous pretenses of glamour and ease, the bogus histories reenacted in the dumb, paste-and-spangles cocktail of style. Remove the dead bodies, and the living ones, as Catherine Corman has done in her own supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places, and the force of Chandler’s insight becomes even more terrifyingly urgent: these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes, to keep them from being piled unbearably atop one another, they are actively trying to forget us.”
More images after the jump. Read More »
Oh, New York, it was a pleasure to spy on you this week. We saw Middlesex, The Great Gatsby, and Jane Eyre in kanji. We saw two novels about the gentrification of our fair city: Lush Life by Richard Price and The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Sure, we’ve seen a lot of these books on the subway before, but they’re great, and we’re always happy to see some one enjoying one of our favorites for the first time. Read More »
