shteyngart shenanigans

Gary Shteyngart’s new book Super Sad True Love Story has won the UK’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. Good good. Now watch this:

And THAT’S how you do an author video for your book.

happy friday

I know how he feels.

happy friday

One of his best.

happy friday

Life lessons from an OG.

happy friday

I want to know what’s taking so long for Act II to drop.

Also: I apologize for the spotty posting recently — my mom is in town. Things will return to normal next week.

mean monday

I saw Jonathan Franzen on Friday and got a copy of the book signed. For anyone who didn’t make it out, here’s a video of him talking:

It’s probably going to be a little while until I get to read the thing, though. I’m still trudging along through The New York Trilogy, and after that I’m going to read a few Graham Greene novels. I’ve come across mentions of Greene many times, but I have to admit I don’t know much about him, and I don’t know many people who are very familiar with his work. It’s going to be great fun.

In other news, Joshua Ferris will be coming to Bookpeople next Tuesday in promotion of his book The Unnamed. I read his debut, Then We Came To The End, and really enjoyed it, and I’m curious to see what he has to say about his latest novel. If I remember correctly, the reviews were overall mostly positive, so maybe one of these days when I have less on my plate I’ll check it out.

happy friday

“being the worst in the wu is like being the least athletic gold medal winner” -YouTube user wetmurder

old new pork

I was having a conversation with a buddy several days ago about place in writing and the predominance of New York City as the setting for much of the literary fiction in America, specifically fiction “we” hold in high esteem, and by “we” I mean the literary industrial complex, which is — of course — centered in NYC. Of course not all great fiction is written or takes place in NYC, but there is definitely a biased drift towards the eastern seaboard.

Here’s what David Simon, creator of the television show The Wire thinks about that:

Inflamed rhetoric aside, I like what he has to say. New York City is seen as a synecdoche for America, and novels about life in the City are seen as novels about the American experience. But, as Simon points out, this is no longer the case. As I said in an earlier entry, the age of the Great American Novel is over because of the increasingly fractured and heterogeneous nature of our culture. It’s becoming impossible for one novel to engage every sort of American experience in the same way it’s becoming impossible to see those experiences through the lens of a single city. Our mono-culture (read: educated white [male] culture) is losing ground to a plurality of cultures from all walks of life and from all ends of the globe that don’t identify with the New York City idea of urban America, and what these people want is a literature that speaks to them, that speaks to their realities and lives.