AMAZON: From the very beginning, life on Earth has been defined by war. Today, those first wars continue to be fought around and literally inside us, influencing our individual behavior and that of civilization as a whole. War between populations-whether between different species or between rival groups of humans-is seen as an inevitable part of the evolutionary process. The popular concept of “the survival of the fittest” explains and often excuses these actions. In Population Wars, Greg Graffin points to where the mainstream view of evolutionary theory has led us astray. That misunderstanding has allowed us to justify wars […]
BOOKS: The Day The Clown Cried
Artwork by CHLOE CUSHMAN NATIONAL POST: Jonathan Franzen is the punchline to an ongoing joke. Please forgive me for being the boorish person who attempts to explain the gag. Franzen, with his noted self-seriousness, his ambivalence about modernity, his anger at the world for turning, always turning, stands in for a character type, one frequently dismissed on Twitter with the ironic (but dead serious) nouning of “old.” Franzen, at 56, is an Old. He is chagrined and scandalized by kids today, with our student debt and our start-ups, with our selfies and our Snapchat. In the media, Franzen is all […]
THE BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE YOU DIE
BY COLE NOWLIN John Kennedy Toole’s picaresque classic, A Confederacy of Dunces, is an absurdist-comic masterstroke of a novel. It is the story of Ignatius Reilly, an educated, layabout medieval scholar, living in New Orleans with his mother. Ignatius is an obese, petulant, eloquent man-elephant who belches Boethius and hot dog gas while promenading around New Orleans’ French Quarter. A Confederacy of Dunces meanders through Ignatius’s stumblings around the Big Easy allowing ample room for comic digression and development of other characters. Toole does a masterful job of capturing the slang and patois of the denizens of the French […]
Win Tix To See The End Of The Tour @ The Prince
Time is short, so I will cut to the chase: we have a handful of tix to see a special VIP screening of THE END OF THE TOUR, starring Jason Segel as novelist David Foster Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as the magazine writer guy that followed him around on the book tour for Infinite Jest for an article that never published and then turned it into a book/movie after the author’s suicide in 2008 and thereby incurred the wrath of DFW disciples from here to Pluto. The screening is at 7:30 Wednesday night at The Prince Theater. To qualify […]
BOOKS: 9/11 And The Prophecy Of Dune
THE GUARDIAN: Every fantasy reflects the place and time that produced it. If The Lord of the Rings is about the rise of fascism and the trauma of the second world war, and Game of Thrones, with its cynical realpolitik and cast of precarious, entrepreneurial characters is a fairytale of neoliberalism, then Dune is the paradigmatic fantasy of the Age of Aquarius. Its concerns – environmental stress, human potential, altered states of consciousness and the developing countries’ revolution against imperialism – are blended together into an era-defining vision of personal and cosmic transformation. Books read differently as the world […]
TRUTH & CONSEQUENCES: Q&A w/ Marc Maron
Photo by Larry Hirshowitz UPDATE: Marc Maron on Fresh Air BY JONATHAN VALANIA Marc Maron pretty much wrote the book on how not to write the book — the book on how to win friends and influence people, how to succeed in showbiz without really trying, how to enjoy harmless recreational drugs like cocaine responsibly. Whatever his books about those topics (in truth, there are no books like that, but stick with me I’m going somewhere with this) tell you to do, do the exact opposite. Unless you want to find yourself on the far side of 40, bottomed out […]
THE BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE YOU DIE
BY LUKE HOPELY I really don’t know much about Barry Hannah, and after reading Airships I was really pissed the fuck off about this fact. I know that he is a Southern writer and his name is bounced around with the likes of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor on his book covers. I know that he wrote books from the 70s until his death in 2010. He wrote Airships in the 70s while going through the obligatory alcoholic phase all great writers seem to enter, although some never leave (looking at you Hemingway). Most of importantly I know Barry Hannah […]
THE BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE YOU DIE
BY LUKE ROBERT HOPELY Cormac McCarthy writes spectral Western epics that both examine and embody (and, some would say, revel in) the savage beauty of man’s inhumanity to man. There are many Cormac McCarthy books you should read before you die, but if you only read one, make it Blood Meridian. This book does two things, and it does them with the same pitiless efficacy that makes his prose crackle. First, it gets its point across, and that point is how goddamn awful humans are, how we lust lust for violence, how we always have and always will. McCarthy […]
BOOKS: Infinite Guest
Artwork by TOMMASO PINCIO If David Foster Wallace were alive today, would the famously introverted author be flattered to see himself on the big screen, or horrified at the commodification of his very identity? James Ponsoldt’s new film The End of the Tour recreates five days that the late author David Foster Wallace spent traveling around the Midwest with Rolling Stone Magazine writer David Lipsky around 1996, shortly after Wallace’s critically acclaimed novel Infinite Jest was published. In the film, the two men have a number of philosophical conversations about writing, life, sex, and fame — kind of like if […]
IN MEMORIAM: Novelist Kent Haruf 1943-2014
BY MIKE WALSH I spent a few years living in a small town in the northeastern plains of Colorado. That is also the same area where Kent Haruf set all of his novels, so I’ve felt an affinity with the man and his work. His novels remind me of that time in my life, those places, and the people who live in that area of the country. I’m also a fan of Haruf because his novels are just plain great. Haruf died on November 30 of liver disease. He was 71. All of Haruf’s novels are set in the fictional […]
REWIND 2014: The Year In Questions And Answers
If armies run on their stomachs, blogs run on their big fucking mouths. We’re no exception. But we’d like to think that, on a good day, we put all that hot air to good use when interrogating visiting dignitaries in advance of their triumphant arrival into the City Of Brotherly Love. We’ve never pretended to have all the answers but we do know all the right questions. And we’ve never settled for easy answers to hard questions. Sometimes feelings get hurt and sometimes new connections are made. Sometimes painful truths emerge and sometimes we actually learn something. And sometimes we […]
PAINT IT BLACK: Q&A With Paul Trynka, Author of “BRIAN JONES: The Making Of The Rolling Stones”
BY JONATHAN VALANIA A candid conversation with former MOJO editor Paul Trynka [pictured, below right] — author of IGGY POP: Open Up And Bleed and DAVID BOWIE: Star Man — about his new bio, BRIAN JONES: The Making Of The Rolling Stones. (The British version has a much edgier, and dare I say it Stonsier title, SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: The Birth Of The Rolling Stones & The Death Of Brian Jones. Guess Random House thinks the devil doesn’t get his due in America. We’re inclined to disagree, but that’s a conversation for another time.) DISCUSSED: Blowjobs, pills, genius, […]
BOOKS: Why Lena Dunham’s Memoir Is Everything That’s Wrong With Girls Like Lena Dunham
BY STEPHANIE SHAMP In the pursuit of not wasting my time, I generally only read memoirs that are: A. Recommended by a close friend B. Written past the age of 40 C. Dark with funny moments or funny with dark moments D. Profoundly moving I’m sorry to report that Not That Kind of Girl meets none of my basic requirements. Fact is, Lena Dunham’s life is just not that interesting. Born to two artists and raised in what is never directly said but implied to be a middle-class home with her younger sister in New York, Dunham is the […]