[illustration by ALEX FINE] Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls, spoke to PHAWKER about what spurs him to write about small-town life, class and it’s relation to geography in his new book, Bridge of Sighs, and his newest screenplays. He will be speaking at the Free Library tonight. PHAWKER: How has winning the Pulitzer changed how you live and write? RICHARD RUSSO: Well I got caller ID. [laughs] That’s one way it’s changed how we live. I think it changed my writing more; it was just such a wonderful thing to happen that I kind of […]
AUTHOR AUTHOR: John Leland Saw The Best Minds Of A Generation Destroyed By Madness, Starving Hysterical Naked, Dragging Themselves Through The Negro Streets At Dawn Looking For An Angry Fix, Angelheaded Hipsters Burning For The Ancient Heavenly Connection To The Starry Dynamo In The Machinery Of Night. Etc.
PHAWKER: You were, to my mind, the first white rock critic of stature to take rap music seriously. You had that column in Spin back in the mid-80s when Spin really mattered and you were always plumbing the depths of Stetsasonic and Biz Markie and shit. I remember Guccione writing in his Letter From The Editor “is Leland really serious with this rap thing?” What flipped your switch and caused you to sit up and pay attention? JOHN LELAND: I lived in an apartment on 99th Street [in New York] which was right by the handball court and where there’s […]
AUTHOR, AUTHOR: 13 Things You Are Not Supposed To Know About Daniel Handler, AKA Lemony Snicket
1. Mr. Handler is answering these questions while sipping his second Blanton’s in his posh room at the Four Seasons. 2. Mr. Handler plays accordion on the new Magnetic Fields album, Distortion, due out in January. He will be touring with the band on the West Coast. 3. Mr. Handler only bothered to learn to play the accordion so he could pick up chicks. “When I was coming up it was during that brief time in rock history when no keyboard whatsoever was cool, and that’s the only instrument I played. I really, really wanted to be in a band, […]
NEVER FORGET: The NAZIS Burned Books
Sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, and a variety of other groups, Banned Books Week (Sept. 29-Oct. 6, 2007) celebrates the first amendment right to free speech, which includes the right to read and write books that are considered unorthodox or controversial. A banned book is one that has actually been removed from a library or school system, a “challenged” book is the attempt to ban such material. THE 10 MOST CHALLENGED BOOKS OF 2006 And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell Gossip Girls (Series) by Cecily Von Ziegesar Alice (Series) by […]
EARLY WORD: Sangria And Santa Sangre At Molly’s
Molly’s Bookstore will host a film screening of Jodorowsky‘s classic Santa Sangre on Friday, September 14 to dedicate our new mosaic facade by Isaiah Zagar. Doors open at 7PM and the screening starts at 8PM. Admission is free. Donations and book purchases are encouraged. Join us for free sangria, refreshments and surprise special guest performances before and after the film. Molly’s Bookstore is a general interest new and used bookstore. It is located at 1010 S. 9th Street, in the heart of The Italian Market.
MUST HEAR RADIO: It Can’t Happen Here?
FRESH AIR As head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith led the team of lawyers that advises the presidency on the limits of executive power. During his tenure, he battled the Bush White House on the now-infamous “torture memos,” as well as on issues of surveillance and the detention and trial of suspected terrorists. Goldsmith resigned his post after nine months. He’s speaking publicly for the first time about why he resigned in a new memoir, The Terror Presidency — which also recounts what he witnessed in Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room, when Alberto Gonzales and […]
AUTHOR, AUTHOR: Rick Moody Q&A
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. Add to the mix varying degrees of alcoholism and a drug that helps you recover memories, thwarted obsession and intra -office subterfuge, and a bomb that flattens Manhattan from The Hudson […]
TEXAS OBSERVER: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Chasing Assassins Bobby Kennedy died believing his brother’s killers had not been found by Matthew Stevenson/THE TEXAS OBSERVER Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years By David Talbot Simon & Schuster 478 pages, $28 When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas in November 1963, his younger brother Robert, then the U.S. attorney general, was having lunch at his home in northern Virginia. As recounted in Brothers, David Talbot’s stirring and troubling history of Bobby’s descent into the underworlds of conspiracy, word of the shooting reached him when J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, telephoned. In […]
BREAKING: After 43 Years, Harper Lee Speaks!
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee is a woman of few words and generally avoids media interviews and public appearances. But the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird” broke her silence briefly Monday at a ceremony inducting four new members, including former home-run king Hank Aaron, into the Alabama Academy of Honor. Lee, who lives in Monroeville, is a member of the academy, which honors living Alabamians, and was in the audience for Monday’s ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, Academy of Honor chairman Tom Carruthers joked with Lee, saying he knew she had something she wanted to […]
DAYS OF FUTURE PAST: William Gibson Overdrive
BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC William Gibson, acclaimed sci-fi author, noted futurist and coiner of the term “cyberspace,” will be the first to tell you that all his books have actually been about the present — the fact that they feel like the future only points out our chronic alienation from the moment we are in. You see, it’s our fault, not his. His new novel, Spook Country, is actually set in the recent past, 2006 to be exact, and focuses on the edgy exploits of rock star-turned- journalist Hollis Henry, who has been assigned to do a piece on […]
AUTHOR, AUTHOR: Q&A With Saira Rao
BY MAVIS LINNEMAN BOOK CRITIC Last week, TV producer-turned-lawyer-turned-author Saira Rao published her first novel, Chambermaid. It is the story of law student Sheila Raj’s clerkship (a must-do for all law students) with a revered 3rd Circuit judge in Philadelphia. Her dream come true turns into her worst nightmare when she realizes the judge is an insufferable tyrant who can’t even get her name right and who could care less about clerks or her regular employees. Think The Devil Wears Prada in judge’s chambers. As Laura Weisberger did for fashion assistants, Rao sheds light on the exacting and often outlandish […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Yiddish Policeman’s Secret Ball
BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Michael Chabon throws down metaphors like a deejay dropping beats, skillfully teasing out the intersections of character and the circumstance that bend, break and, eventually, make them. As author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier & Clay and the critically acclaimed book-turned-movie Wonder Boys, Chabon has proven himself time and time again as a master storyteller. His new novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is no exception. Lovers of film noir will appreciate Chabon’s protagonist, Detective Meyer Landsman, for his Bogart-like qualities. Like Bogey in The Big Sleep, Landsman is at once a ruthless, […]
BOOKS: The Dangerous Book For Boys
BY KAREN HELLER INQUIRER COLUMNIST Could there be a more brilliant title than The Dangerous Book for Boys? This handsome volume, authored by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, proffers advice on such essentials as spiders, poker, invisible ink, skinning a rabbit and making a go-cart, things every boy’s father knew as a boy. OK, let’s not kid ourselves here. Every boy’s grandfather. A phenomenon in the authors’ native England where it was published a year ago, Dangerous was named British Book of the Year, with more than half a million copies in print. Since its May debut on these shores, […]