Tag: Books
John Darnielle is the lead singer and songwriter of the Mountain Goats, a wordy indie folk band with an obsessive cult following. In addition to being “one of the best lyricists of his generation” (as his book bio generously, but accurately, puts it), Darnielle is also one of the most prolific. His 14 full length LPs are […]
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is a notoriously “difficult” book, and one of the last ones to come to mind when you think of books to make in Lego form. Supposedly, the late author told his friend Jonathan Franzen that “the story can’t fully be made sense of.” But an eleven-year-old boy named Sebastian Griffith has […]
Like a pro, James Frey keeps on diversifying. After A Million Little Pieces, a very successful and very fake nonfiction memoir about his “drug addiction” and “criminal past,” Frey wrote two more international bestsellers and founded a young adult transmedia sweatshop. His latest endeavor brings out his artsy side. In 2012, when he was a co-owner of New York’s Half Gallery, Frey purchased a garden gnome […]
Grantland just published “Fifteen Years Later: Tom Cruise and Magnolia,” an excerpt from Amy Nicholson’s book Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor. It’s fascinating. Here’s a bit about Paul Thomas Anderson, Tom Cruise and Tom Cruise’s giant commitment. Cruise gives the role a fascinating combination of confidence and insecurity. He comes on like a gorilla — literally […]
Branding Terror — a book by graphic designer Francesco Trivini and former counter-terrorism analyst Artur Beifuss — is a fascinating study on the aesthetics of terrorism. The book is meant to serve as an encyclopedia of the logos and symbols that terrorist organizations around the world use as their calling cards, and an analysis of these images from a […]
“The ideal world would be you didn’t know what gender people where till they took their clothes off,” iconic photographer Nan Goldin says in a recent video interview about her new book Eden And After. Decades of photographs of her friends’ children are compiled here and they are distinctly Nan Goldin, filled with secret knowledge, free in androgyny. The […]
When the literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away last week, he left behind En Agosto Nos Vemos (“We’ll Meet In August”), a finished novel that dates back to about 2004. According to the AP, the opening chapter focuses on a married woman who has an affair while visiting her mother’s grave on a tropical island. Cristobal Pera, editor at […]
Richard Marshall reviewed Kafka: The Years Of Insight, the third and final part of Reiner Stach’s Kafka trilogy from Princeton University Press, 2013 and “the loneliness, horror, disgust and shame of writing” and “the awful presence of Kafka, even a Kafka mediated by biography” is almost “too unbearable, too destabilizing, too unnerving.” In other words, this really […]
According to a new scientific study in Science journal, reading literary fiction can greatly improve our ability to understand one another in complex social settings. Social psychologists at The New School, working within the relatively new field called “theory of the mind” conducted a series of five experiments measuring things such as “empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.” Researchers have […]
Have you heard of Rospotrebnadzor? We haven’t, until 30 minutes ago, when Anatoli Ulyanov of art site Looo.ch told ANIMAL that Rospotrebnadzor — Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare — has blocked their site and added it into the Registry of Forbidden Sites. This means that every ISP in Russia is blocking Looo.ch from their customers. […]
