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

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There are infinite LOLs to be had on the internet, but only one book each year can win the Thurber Prize for American Humor. The contenders for an award that has in the past gone to David Sedaris and Jon Stewart this year include Sloane Crosley, Ian Frazier, Don Lee and Laurie Notaro. Among the unrecognized: the prevailing internet trend of LOLCats, which was translated into last year’s paperback I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun.  Instead, this year’s nominations went to three essay collections and a novel.  How did Crosley, nominated for I Was Told There’d Be Cake, take the news? She told us:

I’d be honored to be on the same e-mail chain as these other writers, so to be put up for the same prize is out of control.

As for Professor Happycat, there’s always next year.

Usually just one to three minutes long, the best book trailers swiftly inform potential readers of what to expect. But unlike most movie previews, these trailers are often interpretive, rather than plot-focused; they spring from the imagination of their creators, as well as from the books they represent. Search YouTube and you’ll find thousands of examples. Read More »

“If there’s one thing for which I have zero tolerance, it’s the smell of Lay’s potato chips. You’d have more luck waking me up by wafting the smell of those processed starch discs beneath my nose than you would with smelling salts and 100-year-old ether. Which is too bad for Lay’s potato chips, because it’s not their fault. It’s the tequila’s fault.”

– From a hilarious essay called “Letting the Chips Fall” by our longtime girl crush Sloane Crosley (seriously, have you seen her dioramas?) on the New York Times‘s not so alcohol-friendly Proof blog. If you haven’t bought her book of essays, do it now.

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.
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It was a trading places moment book publicist SLOANE CROSLEY became a New York media darling last fall. With the release of her first book of personal essays, I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE, people went a little nuts for all things Sloane — including us after we spotted the Diorama Diaries section on her Web site.

It was like a budget, DIY-version of our childhood dollhouse, but much more thoughtful and intricate. Paper clip hangers! We spent hours studying those images and chuckling to ourselves. We wanted to play with them in real life. We wanted to make some that featured scenes from our lives!

To put it politely, we were a tad obsessed. Reading Sloane’s book made her feel like one of our good friends; and those are the people who we usually bug for good book recommendations. That’s why we’ve asked her to give us the names a few of her favorite essayists.

Sloane’s picks after the jump.
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