Writers who marry or woo other writers — it’s a bold move, considering the egos involved and the social isolation necessary to get a decent amount of good work done. And yet the authors below tried to make it work; some stayed together for months and some were even able to make it last years. Many of the following authors even acted as mentors to their younger paramours, giving their careers a boost by introducing them to editors and other important members of literary circles. If you’re interested in learning more about writers’ affairs of the heart, Katie Roiphe details some of the following relationships in her book, Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages. So read on, dear readers, and tell us which couples we missed in the comments section below.
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Today at Flavorpill, we wished that the world had more adorable skydiving grannies like 82-year-old birthday girl/lifelong daredevil Judy Wade. We discovered that Mad Men screenshots and Arrested Development dialogue go surprisingly well together. We couldn’t believe that ABC thinks that they can replace Roseanne Barr with the likes of Kirstie Alley. We supported public broadcasting by downloading a free mixtape of Anti- artists including Wilco, Tom Waits, Neko Case, Mavis Staples, and Dr. Dog. We liked Andy Rash’s 8-bit take on the cast of Breaking Bad. We wondered how long it took Bronx Zoo staffers to assemble these life-sized LEGO versions of various wild animals. We decided that Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” definitely needs the gyrating Courtney Cox after watching the original video. We were excited to read that Norman Mailer’s son wants to direct Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s screenplay adaptation of his father’s novel The Deer Park. We found out which New York City kitchens are literally the hottest. And finally, we got a good chuckle out of this flowchart that details the do’s and don’ts of being mad on the Internet.
On this day in 1953, an armistice between the US, China, and the two Koreas officially ends the Korean War. Since we’re still stuck in a protracted conflict in the Middle East and South Asia, we figured it was as good a time as any to discuss the books in the past century that spoke frankly about the horrors of war on the battlefield and in the air. After WWI, novels about wars became best sellers, as veterans became writers and began to attempt to make sense of what happened through the written word. Though we’re now in the era of spy thrillers and identity theft cases, it’s important to look back at the novels and memoirs that moved generations to rethink their past assumptions about war and conflict at home and abroad. When will we receive the books from the veterans in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what were the war books that influenced you, readers?
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Patrick Kingsley recently wrote in The Guardian about “poisonous literary feuds” and the peacemakers who could broker a truce. We ran a post on the subject last year, but thought we would do an international list of troublemakers this time around. We’d also like to honor the man who racked up the most hours feuding with his literary colleagues: Norman Mailer. Writers today generally aren’t as venomous toward each other (although maybe Colson Whitehead would disagree after his salivary encounter with Richard Ford). We have to agree with Mailer’s proclamation on The Dick Cavett Show: “I’m going to be the champ until one of you knocks me off.”
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Last month, The New York Times ran a slideshow of Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, which will be up for sale shortly. This got us thinking about our favorite authors, where they lived, and how much our environment shapes our work. (If it does, then we’re really in trouble, since we mostly write in a dark Brooklyn apartment with neighbors who smoke packs of cigarettes and scream at their children in languages we don’t understand.) A.N. Devers, a literary pilgrim, commissioned Michael Fusco and Emma Straub to make great, inexpensive posters of authors’ domiciles — from Emily Dickinson’s homestead to Zora Neale Hurston’s modest bungalow — and they are available here. If you’re interested in a writer’s first person account of her tour of famous authors’ homes, then check out A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses by Anne Trubek. Click through now to take a virtual tour of some of our favorite writers’ residences.
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Cheeky painter Harland Miller creates irreverent reinterpretations of Penguin Classics. The paintings, many of which he compiled in a 2007 Rizzoli book, often prod at a deeper truth about the author or text, or just plain make fun — like his oh-so-appropriate titular approximation of every Hemingway novel ever and his stab at imagining Poe’s delusional mindset. Plus, as A Continuous Lean points out, Miller is a model in a new Dunhill campaign, which only reminds everyone how much they want to spend that thousand dollars on his art instead of on fancy-manly accessories. Indulge yourself, and click through for a gallery of Miller’s Penguin-inspired artworks, but be warned: profanity abounds.
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Taschen and Phaidon. Two art publishing houses with two very distinct reputations. So don’t you think it’s high time for a face-off between the two? Good! Let’s begin with the Collector’s Edition wars.
Benedikt Taschen turned 50 this past February and his debaucherous party was written up in The New Yorker a few days ago. The cult lowbrow publisher never fails to shock and titillate, and his aim to create lasting, limited-edition books has made him a hero to many. On Taschen’s website, Benedikt writes that he “sensed early on that books could open doors to different worlds, and that a world full of artists and free-minded spirits was the world I wanted to be part of.”
The venerable Phaidon Press is now in its 88th year, and it launched by printing a large format Van Gogh monograph in 1936, which sold out within two days of publication. On its website, Nigel Spivey, a lecturer in classical art at Cambridge, writes that Phaidon is named after Plato’s middle-period dialogues on the immortality of the soul. “By means of beauty, beautiful things become beautiful,” Socrates says to Phaidon and company. Which is one way of putting it, we suppose.
The gloves are off, and the niceties have been done away with. Let’s brawl!
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If we’re being honest: Sometimes sex is bad. It’s not always fireworks. It’s not always trumpeting and transcendent. Cosmic couplings, two-bodies-as-one, those sorts of rolls in the hay don’t happen every time you hit it. Thundering mind-annihilating orgasms are elusive.
And sometimes sex is bad in books — but we’re not talking the Bad Sex in Fiction of the infamous award. We’re not talking nipples like rodent noses or penises like pile-drivers (thanks, Rowan Somerville and Nick Cave). Nope, we’re talking about sex scenes in literature that explore the times when sex is sad, when it’s mournful, melancholy, desperate, violent, lonely, regrettable, necessary, inevitable. The times that leave you emptier than you’d started. These passages eschew the air-brushed fantasy for the messy truth (which is not to say these scenes aren’t erotic in their own ways). Below, the best of bad sex.
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It’s hard being a member of the creative class sometimes. Writers throughout history have been known to run afoul of the law, with charges ranging from disorderly conduct to murder. With the advent of the mug shot in the late 1800s, a latent image emerged of these various offenses, realized through this new, curious medium. In On Photography, Susan Sontag wrote, “The camera has the power to catch so-called normal people in such a way as to make them look abnormal.” But what if you’re unusual to begin with — what does the camera capture then? The following is a list of the top 10 authors to have walked the line.
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The release of Quirk Classics’ The Meowmorphosis reimagines Franz Kafka’s classic tale with a Lolcat friendly kitten instead of the original insect. Although Kafka isn’t known to have been particularly cute or cuddly in either his life or work (though skittish, yes), we couldn’t help but ponder which animals do match up with famous authors. It’s an imprecise science, sure, but here are our bids for cross-species author/animal pairings.
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