Cat Marnell is a writer whose persona is tightly wound up with her acknowledged drug use. Last March, the book proposal for her tentatively titled memoir How to Murder Your Life, a Basketball Diaries meets The Devil Meets Prada sketch, sold to Simon & Schuster for $500,000. Earlier this week, we received a concerned tip with the subject header: "Cat Marnell almost died the other night."
British singer and living embodiment of ennui Morrissey has reportedly yanked his upcoming book just a week before it'd been scheduled to hit shelves, and nobody really knows why. Well, I wonder.
Marisha Pessl's new 600-page thriller Night Film centers on a fictional recluse named Stanislas Cordova, who made films so horrifically, soul-destroyingly evil they were effectively banned in the U.S. When his beautiful young daughter mysteriously dies, an investigative journalist becomes infected with the need to pursue the truth behind this seemingly sinister family.
William T. Vollman, pictured left, is not the Unabomber. He's a National Book-Award winning novelist, and a certified weirdo, but he's not the Unabomber. Or, for that matter, the Anthrax mailer. And yet the FBI thought he might be.
A New York library director has asked a little boy who loves books to quit reading so damn much because he's making the other kids look bad.
A mere two days after finding George Zimmerman innocent of the murder of Trayvon Martin, juror B37 in the case has signed on with a prominent literary agent, as a prelude to a book deal. This juror is a woman who hates the media and went into the trial mistakenly believing there were "riots" over the case.
Adelle Waldman originally set out to write a response to all the novels about young literary men coming to New York. For her, there always seemed to be a key element missing from the romantic relationships in these books; The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. and its central character directly addresses the complications of love affairs that are so often glossed over.
Spoiler alert alert: A spoiler alert follows. It itself may be too revealing. My suggestion is to stop reading this post and start reading Karen Joy Fowler's novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves like now.
How did Dan Brown, the immensely popular and successful bad writer behind such hits as The Da Vinci Code and Hey, There's a Treasure Map Under This Painting!, get to be such an immensely popular and successful bad writer? He just loves "reading," meaning "listening to stuff."
Millennials these days are so busy fiddling with their technological gadgets and maintaining their #personalbrands, they have basically forgotten how to read like grown-ups. The youth of today are eschewing realism and historical fiction in favor of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi novels. As part of NPR's month-long look at the media consumed by today's youth, they examine what these modern reading habits means for today's reading children.
Everybody claims to love Joe Biden, but in fact nobody wants to hear his story. They just want to objectify him as the "cool old creep" who somehow became vice president. If people truly cared about Joe Biden, he would've made a lot more than "less than $201" on book sales.
Nathaniel Rich's second novel, Odds Against Tomorrow, traces the life of Mitchell Zukor, a young mathematician obsessed with predicting apocalyptic natural disasters. After college he finds himself working for a secretive insurance firm in New York City, where his ability to predict these cataclysms becomes his job. After his predictions are realized, Zukor is proclaimed a prophet in this new world, ravaged by natural disasters.
Gawker is very excited to host a Q&A with author Salman Rushdie and filmmaker Deepa Mehta. Salman has adapted his classic 1981 novel Midnight's Children into a screenplay and the resulting film, directed by Deepa, will be in select U.S. theaters on April 26. For those who haven't read the book or need a refresher, here is the film's official synopsis:
