PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of “all modern American literature.” Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation’s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: “nigger.” Twain himself defined a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Rather than see Twain’s most important work […]
REWIND 2010: The Year In Phawker Interviews
Talk is cheap on the Internet, but at Phawker it’s totally free, baby — at least for you, dear reader. Trolling through the vast and dusty Phawker archives, we have dug up fat sack of conversations worth re-visiting: the always prickish-but-worth-it Will Oldham on authenticity, Americana and his testicles; the inimitable Black Francis susses out Doolittle for us; graphic artiste extraordinaire Charles Burns on the darkness within; author Hampton Sides discusses the banality of Martin Luther King assassin James Earle Ray’s evil; Dave Bielanko discusses Marah’s last chance power try; folk/rock legend Richard Thompson discusses Fairport Convention and reuniting with […]
WORTH REPEATING: A Christmas Carol
BY CHARLES DICKENS Chapter 1 – Marley’s Ghost Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece […]
BOOKS: Salman Rushdie At The Free Library
[Illustration via ARISTOTLE’S LACKEY] BY CAROLINE SCHMIDT Salman Rushdie’s personal life has been the focus of media attention ever since the publication of The Satanic Verses lead Iran’s Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini to issue a fatwah that called for the author’s execution in 1989 forcing the author into hiding for more than a decade. Starting with 1975’s Grimus, he has published more than a dozen novels, received numerous literary prizes, including the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 1981’s Midnight’s Children, and been knighted by Queen Elizabeth. He is more infamously known for his four marriages — to striking women with names […]
BOOKS: Keef’s Life Sentences
NEW YORK TIMES: “Life” has already attracted undue attention for a schoolyard-sounding anatomical swipe at Mr. Jagger. But this is a book that pulls no punches, and most of its disses are more serious than that. “Cold-blooded” and “vicious” are only two of the more printable words he uses to describe Brian Jones. Allen Ginsberg was an “old gasbag.” Mick Taylor, the former Rolling Stone, “didn’t do anything” after he left the band, and Donald Cammell, the film director (“Performance,” starring Mr. Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Mr. Richards’s longtime lover and partner in crime), couldn’t commit suicide quickly enough to […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Comedian Mike Birbiglia was on tour in Washington state when he had a dream that a guided missile was heading toward his hotel room. In his dream — and in real life — Birbiglia decided to jump out the window of his hotel room. He was staying on the second floor. Birbiglia survived, receiving 33 stitches for gashes in his legs. When he returned home to New York, he was sent to a sleep physician for overnight observation. “They put the electrodes all over my body and observed my sleep and I was diagnosed with REM behavior disorder, […]
BOOKS: Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BY PAUL MAHER JR. The dystopian satire of Gary Shteyngart’s splendid affecting novel Super Sad True Love Story is anchored deep into the neuroses of an America that no longer is able to distinguish its objectives from its agendas. The novel’s landscape is less the chaotic sensory overload of Blade Runner than it is the bleak rain-soaked miasma of Taxi Driver, a Gotham sprawl seen from within a tortoise shell. The novel’s protagonist, Lenny Abramov, is no Travis Bickle however. Likening him to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man is a more accurate comparison. Like the Dostoyevsky, Shteyngart richly […]
New York Times Reviews Will Bunch’s Backlash
NEW YORK TIMES: By far the most compelling, if not terribly original, arguments in “The Backlash” concern the current media environment, which has amplified the loudest and most partisan voices, and helped spread fact-free theories about President Obama’s not being born in the United States or wanting to take away people’s guns. Mr. Bunch invokes Neil Postman — who argued in his seminal 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” that the entertainment values promoted by television are subverting public discourse — to explore the phenomenon of Mr. Beck and his shameless emotional appeals to his audience’s deepest fears about change […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR “[Jimmie Dale Gilmore‘s] voice would make even Hank Williams cry,” Nicholas Dawidoff once wrote in The New York Times Magazine. Gilmore, a singer from West Texas, writes songs that would be described as alternative country. But he sings honky-tonk country classics on his album Come on Back , which he discussed in a 2005 interview with Terry Gross. The album, a tribute to Gilmore’s late father, contains versions of his father’s favorite songs like “Walkin’ the Floor Over You” and “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down.” “[Pick Me Up] represents an entire style that I really associate […]
TONIGHT’S FORECAST: Hot And Moody
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] EDITOR’S NOTE: Rick Moody will be discussing/reading from his new book Four Fingers Of Death at the Free Library tonight. The following interview ran back in 2007, upon the release of Right Livelihoods. BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Rick Moody tackles the hallucinatory pathologies of American paranoia in Right Livelihoods, a collection of three thematically-connected novellas. Each story centers on a paranoid protagonist who serves as unreliable narrator and as a result, the reader spends an awful lot of time wondering just what the hell is going on — which only adds to the ultra-vivid realism […]
BOOKS: The Letters of Kerouac and Ginsberg
[Paintings by ART BY DOC] Jack Kerouac /Allen Ginsberg: The Letters Edited by Bill Morgan & David Stanford Hardcover: 528 pages Publisher: Viking Adult $35.00 BY PAUL MAHER JR. BOOKS EDITOR Is there a point “reviewing” a collection of private letters that were never meant for publication? When the letters are written by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, twin avatars of all things Beat, who saw the best minds of their generation destroyed madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging them through the negro streets at dawn, angel-headed hipsters that burned for the starry dynamo in the machinery of night — well, […]
GREATEST HITS: Q&A With Author Rick Moody
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] EDITOR’S NOTE: Rick Moody will be speaking at the Free Library on July 29th. The following interview ran back in 2007, upon the release of Right Livelihoods. BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Rick Moody tackles the hallucinatory pathologies of American paranoia in Right Livelihoods, a collection of three thematically-connected novellas. Each story centers on a paranoid protagonist who serves as unreliable narrator and as a result, the reader spends an awful lot of time wondering just what the hell is going on — which only adds to the ultra-vivid realism and disconcerting familiarity of it all. […]
BOOKS: To Kill A Mockingbird Turns 50
TOM BROKAW: It was one of those memorable pieces of literary fiction that came along at an impressionable time in my life, and also in the country’s life. Dr. King had already started the movement at that point, we were paying attention on national television every night on the network news to what was going on in the South, and this book spoke to us. I knew people like that, who were willing to stand up in these kinds of communities against the conventional wisdom of the time. Racism didn’t stop at the Mason-Dixon Line. A lot of those same […]