My first kiss was a wash. I must have been four years old, because my sister was a baby. My best friend Alexander and I took advantage of the distraction she was causing to sneak away from the movie that my mother had left...
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Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City (FSG Originals) is a nonfiction look at more than two thousand years of heists, break-ins, and escapes. His book approaches the city the way a burglar would, with an eye for vulnerabilities and blind...
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Most of what we’ve heard about Werner Herzog is untrue. The sheer number of false rumors and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing. Yet Herzog’s body of work is one of the most important in postwar European cinema. This conversation is excerpted from Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Paul Cronin’s volume of dialogues that provides a forum for Herzog’s fascinating views on the things, ideas, and people that have preoccupied him for so many years. This revised edition of Herzog on Herzog features new interviews discussing Herzog’s films, as well as additional text from Herzog, his collaborator Herbert Golder, physicist Lawrence Krauss, and filmmaker Harmony Korine.
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Authors and Editors in Conversation Sean McDonald: How surreal has it been to watch your debut novel, Hemlock Grove, become a TV series? How closely does it track what you imagined when you were writing? Brian McGreevy: There has been no shortage of interesting or disconcerting moments; for instance, standing in a physical location that had previously existed exclusively in your head is a bit of a reality collapse. It is also inevitable that the actor you cast for a part will have certain insights that you can’t—even if it’s a character you’ve been thinking about for five years—because this is an intelligent, sensitive person whose sole job is to think about it, and also because someone who is a closer approximation to the character’s age, sex, and physicality by nature will have a perspective that the author can’t.
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by Dennis Mahoney It’s 1990 and I’m a loser. Becoming a novelist hasn’t crossed my mind. I’m a high-school junior who’s shown some aptitude in art, and by aptitude I mean I’m better than classmates who don’t try at all. My art teacher is just happy I do the assignments instead of throwing Exact-o knives into the ceiling. I had a creative impulse throughout my early life, fueled by supportive parents, Legos, and the original Star Wars trilogy. Relatives raved about my drawings. I got a spaceship illustration printed in the local paper during grade school. And I didn’t really want to be Luke or Han. I wanted to be George Lucas and create something awesome. But I couldn’t be bothered to develop any skills. Mötley Crüe was big in my life, as were the Commodore 64 video games my friends and I swapped along our paper routes. I had bad hair, just shy of a bowl cut. Major cysts instead of zits. A soft, pale, jean-jacketed body. I’d never had a serious girlfriend because girls have standards, and because I kept thinking my luck might change, which is the best way to ensure it never, ever does.
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On Disney, David Lynch, and Django Unchained by Eric G. Wilson In the weeks after the Sandy Hook Elementary School killings, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained—which depicts a freed American slave taking bloody revenge on cruel slaveholders—has faced a lot of media scrutiny. Pundits have wondered if this kind of fictional brutality incites real-life violence. It’s a debate that seems to resurface every few years, but in this case the ideologues can save their energy: Django Unchained is more harmless and reassuring than most old-time Disney flicks. Beside it, Bambi is like a noirish nightmare. Tarantino’s gore fulfills our moral fantasies. It’s innocuous commotion setting up, and acting as a foil for, a soothing conclusion in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. And the more horrific the brutality, the more gratifying the reckoning. Compared to the slaughter of Bambi’s mother, never avenged, this kind of closure is pure Pollyanna. Tarantino has been careful to distinguish between the artificial violence of his films and actual carnage. In an interview on NPR, he claimed that viewers are tired of movies on slavery or the Holocaust that depict only pain. They welcome fiction in which the victims rise up to be “the victors and the avengers,” “paying back blood for blood.” This aesthetic violence is “cathartic,” “good for the soul.”
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(Steps In Reverse Order) by Matthew Quick Step 5 - You are going to need a lot of people to purchase your novel—and I do mean a lot! Like, more than you can even imagine. Yes, your father will buy copies for all of his business associates; your mother will tell (in great detail) every single person who comes within a twenty-foot radius all there is to know about you and your work; you will even be contacted by the caretakers of your late grandfather, and they will say he proudly pitched your novel to every doctor and nurse he saw until his last dying breath; your siblings and friends will do everything they can to support you, making signed copies of your movie tie-in edition the standard go-to birthday and holiday gift; but all of this will never be enough—even if your family is enormous and you have impossibly generous friends. You will need complete strangers to buy your work, to fall in love with your words and encourage others to do the same. Sometimes these strangers will write beautiful e-mails that make you ache and believe that maybe you really are on your way, but mostly these strangers will never ever contact you, as you pretend you’re not obsessively checking Amazon numbers and Goodreads reviews. You will have woefully minimal control over the millions of potential book-buyers in the world, even if you tour around; give many TV, radio, and print interviews; speak often; and maintain a healthy web presence. (Even if you miss spending your birthday with your wife for the first time since 1993 so that you can promote the film and MTI.) It’s like trying to control the weather with your hopes and dreams.
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Tupelo Hassman graduated from Columbia's MFA program. Her writing has been published in Paper Street Press, The Portland Review Literary Journal, Tantalum, We Still Like, ZYZZYVA, and by 100WordStory.org, FiveChapters.com, and Invisible City Audio Tours. Tupelo will be filming Girlchild's book tour for a short documentary, "Hardbound: A Novel's Life on the Road." Her website is www.tupelohassman.com. I’m making a documentary about Girlchild’s book tour. Let’s take a moment to consider how crazy this sounds. Yep, totally insane. Before Girlchild had a pub date, in the years spent in the trenches of editing, commas splicing the air over my head, I dreamt of all I would do on the release of my first novel and I made a single rule: say yes. So: I’m going to far-away cities, book clubs, and schools, I’m surfing couches, slinging merch, and, I’m filming the book tour.
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Charles Drazin is a lecturer on cinema at Queen Mary, University of London. His previous books include The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s and In Search of The Third Man. This “canon” of French films is a list not of personal favorites (although some of them are) but of films that I think serve to illustrate some of the key themes of French Cinema. All of them, I hope, bring out the idea that the true importance of the French cinema is the degree to which it inspires and informs our own cinema—“our” meaning specifically the English-speaking cinema.