Everyone’s favorite “thug-life” poet, Nikki Giovanni, is back with an awesome collection of love poems, Bicycles. I must admit that her last project, Acolytes, I wasn’t really a fan of. She was using an interesting, new style that involved way too many ellipses. But now she’s back to awesome, and I, for one, couldn’t be more thrilled.… Read More
John August, possibly my favorite blogger, pointed to this amazing set of instructions by James Tanner for turning any normal sentence into a David Foster Wallace super-sentence.
I know we have some real DFW fans in the PopTen house, so I’d love for you to take a stab at it in the comments section.
Here’s John August’s… Read More
I just received an email from Oprah.com (whoever put me on her mailing list, I’ll find you) titled “Books On a Budget.”
What a fantastic idea for an email! I spend way too much money on books!
Remember when DVDs emptied our wallets? Then Netflix came around and saved us millions?
A few years later, I realized… Read More
By Andy Marino
Gary Lutz is not a well-known fiction writer, and barring some massive, unprecedented shift in consumer taste, will never be famous. He doesn’t seem to be reclusive – there are a few interviews available online – but the number of publications or websites interested in his work is understandably small. When I recommend his book I Looked… Read More
By Andy Marino
First-person narration is a tricky art. If a writer has the ability to transfer a character’s unfiltered thoughts to the page, how does he or she know when to shut the hell up? How many this-is-what-I-think-of-smoked salmon/winter mornings/Black Sabbath digressions flesh out the character or advance the plot? To paraphrase Henry James, is it enough to simply… Read More
I’m sure most of you have read The Tipping Point or Blink, arguably the Harry Potter series for the over-twenty set. I started my Gladwellian voyage years ago with Blink, which was devoured mostly on a subway, and a few months later inhaled Tipping Point, mostly overlooking the Harlem Meer.
Both books delighted with their intellectual-beach-read ease… Read More
There’s nothing I love more than finding a passage in Shakespeare or Moby Dick that I’ve heard before in a hip hop song. What better proof that all ideas are recycled, translated for the current generation?
Dr. Dre? Quoting Moby Dick. Eminem? Quoting Chuang Tzu and Shakespeare. (Really, my theory is that Eminem and Dre travelled back… Read More
I’m not going to front. I fucking LOVE Moby Dick. It’s probably my second favorite book (after East of Eden, of course). The trick is to skip the nautical chapters and stick to getting inebriated off the prose, starting with the second line of the book- the first might be the most famous, but the second is… Read More
By Matt Lambert
Winter is coming, my friends. While speculation that HBO would be bringing “A Song of Ice and Fire” – George R.R. Martin’s epic (and as yet unfinished) fantasy series – to life has been circulating for well over a year now, the official greenlight has just been given to produce Season I, which will be entirely… Read More
So here’s the thing about Literature. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. And sometimes the really good is bad, but only because it’s so goddamn good, you can barely tell it’s good. I mean, you know it’s good, but you don’t like it. That’s kinda how I felt about Cormac McCarthy’s, Blood Meridian (1985) (runs and hides,… Read More
Tomorrow marks 100 days since the BP oil spill in the gulf. I know they “successfully” capped it, but as long as that sucker is still leaking, I’m saying there is still an oil spill. But this disaster got me thinking a lot about the good old days of folk – when popular music regularly included anthems… Read More
Unless you have been living under a rock, you are quite familiar with the body (of work) of Isaiah Mustafa. Mustafa is a former wide-receiver in the NFL, and currently has a talent contract with NBC. He might be better known to you as The Old Spice Guy (heretofore known in this post as OSG). But just in… Read More
