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August 26, 2014 Marina Galperina

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 […]

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August 7, 2014 Marina Galperina

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 […]

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May 6, 2014 Sophie Weiner

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 […]

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May 2, 2014 Marina Galperina

“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 […]

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April 23, 2014 Andy Cush

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 […]

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October 10, 2013 Marina Galperina

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 […]

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October 4, 2013 Kyle Chayka

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 […]

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September 20, 2013 Marina Galperina

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. […]

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Marina Galperina

Printed Matter’s free annual New York Art Book Fair opened last night at MoMA PS1 and two hours in, I hadn’t even made it into the main building, still roaming “The Schoolyard” section. The giant tent right of the dome housed 60 small publishing crews of artists, photographers, writers and stacks, piles, rolls, vials of… printed […]

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September 5, 2013 Kyle Chayka

This is The Wizard of Oz, as told in color only, based on the frequency in which specific colors are either mentioned or alluded to within the text of the book. British artist Jaz Parkinson created this series of alternate book cover designs for Smithsonian because “interested in showing how the human mind can transform a word of text into […]

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