By Gabe Habash
Fun fact: “Tea in the Sahara” by The Police is a reference to The Sheltering Sky, specifically the chapter in the book (titled “Tea in the Sahara”) in which Port is told of three dancers who wish to have tea in the desert, but end up dead from the heat. Here are 11 other book-song connections a little less obvious than The Grapes of Wrath and “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”
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By Gabe Habash
During a stop at Dublin’s Hodges Figgis, I was struck by two things as an American reader. One: most U.K. paperbacks have cheap binding. Two: the covers of most books on the other side of the Atlantic differ drastically from what we see in the States. With the exception of Penguin Classics and a few other publishers that are in both markets, a trip through a U.K. bookstore is an altogether different experience.
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By Gabe Habash
There are a lot of cool things you can discover on Small Demons, a website that acts as a book content web, connecting what artists write about. For example, you can look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and see all the people, places, music, movies, TV/radio, books, food/drink, magazines, events, vehicles, and weapons mentioned in the book. Click on any of those things, say…Planet of the Apes (mentioned on page 301), and see that that movie was also mentioned in Trainspotting and The Rules of Attraction, among other books.
You can also use the site to find the most commonly referenced songs in literature. Here’s the top 10, with some choice quotes for each song.
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By Gabe Habash
Here’s something interesting: basically every writer has an unfinished novel.
An incomplete list:
Here’s something interesting: basically every writer has an unfinished novel.
An incomplete list: Truman Capote, Jack London, Kafka, Stendhal, Charles Dickens, J.R.R. Tolkien, Vladimir Nabokov, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Karl Marx.
And while all those authors have compelling reasons for why they never ended up publishing (most involved death), below we’ve picked 9 unfinished novels with especially great stories for why they never made it to print.
And while all those authors have compelling reasons for why they never ended up publishing (most involved death), below we’ve picked 9 unfinished novels with especially great stories for why they never made it to print.
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By Gabe Habash
Oh, dear friends, it’s been a while since we last entered these hallowed halls of plunging mediocrity. So long that there is dust on How To Avoid Huge Ships. Cobwebs on Dildo Cay. Mold on Microwave for One. Some other sign of disuse on Moon People. But back into the Worst Book Ever Castle we must go, because there is a new book to add to the gallery. We must do our duty and place it where it belongs, for the circle must be closed.
What Are These Strawberries Doing on My Nipples? … I Need Them for the Fruit Salad! isn’t just notable because it has both an exclamation point and a question mark in it–what you’ll discover upon digging deeper within it is a tale of vast sadness and infinite strangeness.
It all begins with Vanessa Feltz, the book’s author and owner of one of the oddest Wikipedia pages you’ll ever see.
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By Gabe Habash
That picture above is an index of page numbers with words I didn’t know in Infinite Jest. So basically, I just added more information to a whopping book of information. I’d be curious to know how many of these words you guys know, and whether other readers of IJ kept a similar list. One of the pleasures of reading the book for me was keeping this list and discovering that such varied bits of existence had such specific words to name them. Looking through a copy of Both Flesh and Not, which has Wallace’s essays separated by two pages of his vocab words, brought back a pretty warm memory of how much fun it was to read IJ‘s sentences.
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By Gabe Habash
The winners for the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced, giving us this year’s best worst writing. The winner this year was Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England, who came up with this beautiful dud:
As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.
The annual contest awards the writers who can conceive of the very worst opening sentences imaginable. Started in 1982 at San Jose State University, the Bulwer-Lytton awards are a nod to the novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose “It was a dark and stormy night” begins with the following:
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By Gabe Habash
If you were some kind of wise guy, you could pie chart Crime and Punishment like this: 95% punishment, and 5% crime. But PWxyz takes pie charts seriously, and we didn’t spend all that money on all this hi-tech pie-making equipment just to mail our pies in. We carefully craft our pies (previously, Underworld pie and Madame Bovary pie) with the finest ingredients.
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By Gabe Habash
Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” is a masterpiece. It’s weird and haunting and absolutely beautiful, and somehow, a 21-minute animated Japanese film from 2007 manages to perfectly capture the story’s mood. The short from Kōji Yamamura won a whole bunch of awards, and you can see why.
Do yourself a favor and take the time to watch (and read the story beforehand if you haven’t!). The film takes a turn toward Bizarreville around the 13:30 mark, when clothes start coming off and the singing of the “Only a doctor, only a doctor” song begins, as sung by Satan’s children.
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