This Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country.
...morePosts Tagged: the daily beast
This Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Best-selling author James Patterson is handing out bonuses to bookstore employees once again, celebrating the people who make best-selling authors possible. The Daily Beast has a roundup of some of the best independent bookstores across the country. As if you needed another reason to move to Canada, Toronto is getting five new bookstores.
...moreWelcome to Miami
For The Daily Beast, Alex Segura analyzes what makes Miami such a great backdrop for mystery novels and stories: It’s easy to be lulled by the Caribbean breeze and beautiful sights, but Miami can be lethal, too, its urban sprawl littered with illicit deals, shocking scandals and seething corruption—a collection of dark tales and only-in-Miami stories […]
...moreDoes Commercial Success Hurt Literature?
Publishers are offering big paydays to debut authors—that’s the good news. The bad news is that the books earning big money aren’t particularly literary. Tom Leclair at The Daily Beast takes to task Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s novel The Nest as too middlebrow to be considered great literature: I understand the economic strategy: a novelist with no […]
...moreBetter Read Saul
Surely one of the healthier ironies of the United States is that its finest postwar novelist was an illegal immigrant from Canada. At The Daily Beast, Michael Weiss writes a long and thoughtful essay on Saul Bellow and his often overlooked current cultural relevance.
...moreThis Week in Posivibes: Don’t Call it a Comeback
Though after a short year-long reunion (and a 48-year history), we’re officially losing Pink Floyd, this summer has been overrun with bands getting back together! Gregg Allman was joined on stage by Jaimoe and Warren Haynes at Peach Fest, and has recently said there is potential for a full Allman Brothers reunion. Culture Club is officially touring […]
...moreGeorge Plimpton: Paris Review Founder, Fireworks Connoisseur
At The Daily Beast, Anthony Haden-Guest reminisces about the annual Fourth of July party thrown by George Plimpton, founder and editor of the Paris Review. Not only did Plimpton throw the biggest and best fireworks parties in the Hamptons, he requested that his ashes be packed into a firework upon his death. Plimpton died in 2003; […]
...moreR.I.P. Formal Writing
Let’s consider that we are seeing a natural movement towards a society in which language is more oral—or in the case of texting, oral-style—where written prose occupies a much smaller space than it used to. As such—might we stop pretending that ordinary people need to be able to write on a level higher than functional? […]
...moreFaulkner’s Quarter
At The Daily Beast, Nathaniel Rich riffs on William Faulkner’s New Orleans: William Faulkner had recently begun a draft of “Dark House,” the novel that would ultimately become Absalom, Absalom!, when he arrived in New Orleans on February 15, 1934. He came to attend an air circus that was being thrown to celebrate the opening of […]
...moreThe Rodney Dangerfield of Literature
For The Daily Beast, Bill Morris has some theories about why Jim Harrison is an underrated writer.
...moreTrigger Warning
Neil Gaiman talks with The Daily Beast about his new story collection, Trigger Warning, why he chose the controversial title, and why he’s become obsessed with the conversation around trigger warnings: It seemed to me that so much of it was about content, about where do we stand on fiction and stories that upset you […]
...moreLost in Translation
Three Percent, a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester, derives its name from the fact that about 3 percent of all the books published in the U.S. every year are translations. But the bulk of these are technical writings or reprints of literary classics; only 0.7 percent are first-time translations of fiction […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, Guernica published “Walking on Water,” an excerpt from Payem Faeli’s 2010 novella, I Will Grow, I Will Bear Fruit… Figs. In this excerpt, translated into English by Sarah Khalili, Faeli provides a meditative taste of the novella’s wandering narrator, a young boy in search of a name. You can see Faeli’s impulse toward […]
...moreStraight Outta Gotham
On August 18, hip-hop and comic book nerds alike convened to celebrate the release of Volume 2 of Ed Piskor’s The Hip-Hop Family Tree, a history of the genre in graphic novel-form. In the Daily Beast, Daniel Genis explains how the competing personae and one-upsmanship among rappers translate so easily to a medium that often […]
...moreJunot Díaz on the Writing Life
…nothing calls for the paper shredder like a story that the writer clearly hasn’t sat on. A story that hasn’t been rewritten, or rewritten enough. So many writers that I encounter send their work in so soon. It shows, it really does. The Daily Beast interviews Junot Díaz about his writing process, the Voices of […]
...moreThe Dish Ran Away With the Andrew Sullivan Readers
Andrew Sullivan is lighting out on his own, hoping his blog The Dish will make enough money to stay afloat without the assistance of the Daily Beast or any other publication. His plan has a number of details that set it apart from other attempts to monetize online media: no ads (for now), no paywall (sort […]
...moreHow Books Clubs Went Indie
“Forty-something Betsy Birdsall jokes that she likes the Rumpus group because it enables her to hang out in her bathrobe and slippers while pretending she has friends. She says Elliot encouraged her to get active with the club’s discussion group. ‘This is the first online community I’ve been a part of,’ Birdsall, a paralegal from […]
...moreSullivan Link Love
At The Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan linked to last week’s essay by Dylan Nice, “Truth in Nonfiction: A Testimonial.” Thanks, Andrew, we love you back!
...moreSelf-published Author Takes On Amazon
After two years of global roaming, Andrew Hyde funded his self-published travel book This Book Is About Travel through the website Kickstarter. His funders indicated their overwhelming preference that his book be available on a Kindle, a sentiment understood and welcomed by the author himself, who is a self-identified Kindle reader. With the Kindle garnering […]
...moreGraphic Renaissance
“If a comic can serve as the mediating mask of tragedy, that might help explain why graphic novels are proving so successful in depicting not only torture and war but illness, domestic conflict, even teenage trauma—anything hard to face in the raw. Comics can morph directly from realism to expressionist fantasy—from a prison cell or […]
...moreWomen’s Prisons
The authors of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives From Women’s Prisons compare stories gathered for the book with last month’s report by Rashida Manjoo, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. The bottom line: women in prisons face rape and abuse by guards, error-ridden medical care, and, in many states, shackling […]
...moreJoan Didion Film
A film on Joan Didion is being created by her nephew, actor and director Chris Dunne. In a clip from the film—which Dunne describes as an “audiobook for the eyes”—the author reads from Blue Nights.
...moreWinning Women
The Daily Beast published an interactive infographic, mapping out where “women are winning.” “Winning” is measured along the lines of justice, health, education, economy and power. Iceland is apparently full of female champions.
...moreBright Lights, Big City and “The Shattering of the Self”
“…Jay McInerney’s 1984 publication of Bright Lights allows us excavation to an even earlier level of American self-confusion. The novel’s second-person narrative, which people found so powerfully affecting, cannot be dismissed as but a clever trick when seen in a broader context—as a visceral reaction to the early stage of a society where Don DeLillo’s […]
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