A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. I'm at that bit* in my new book where I've no idea what's going on or what I'm doing.*from around page 30 to page 250— Ian Rankin (@Beathhigh) January 13, 2015 Ahead of the House of SpeakEasy Gala on Wednesday, January 28, at City Winery NYC, read our reviews of books by our guests, including P.J. O’Rourke‘s The Baby Book: How It Got That Way And It Wasn’t My Fault And I’ll Never Do It Again (Grove Press, 2014) and Susan Fales-Hill‘s Imperfect Bliss (Atria Books, 2012). Rachel Kushner on “Bad Captains”… “My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago,” writes Kushner in the London Review of Books, “as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm.” But never mind the fraying of “the thin membrane of civility” that occurs in bad weather; what do you do if your captain abandons ship? In a wide-ranging meditation on “the noble law of the sea,” encompassing Joseph Conrad, Jonathan Franzen, Jean-Luc Godard, and The Love Boat, the author of The […]

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. You guys, I find that a lot of poetry lately? I don't understand it.(That felt good to get off my chest.)— Elizabeth Gilbert (@GilbertLiz) January 9, 2015 Watch the Golden Globes last night? Check out reviews we wrote of winners Boyhood (Best Motion Picture — Drama; Best Director — Richard Linklater; Best Supporting Actress — Patricia Arquette), Whiplash (Best Supporting Actor — JK Simmons), and Leviathan (Best Foreign Language Film). With more than a faint whiff of WikiLeaks and Anonymous, the Australian writer Peter Carey‘s new novel, Amnesia (Knopf, 2015), is the story of a leftwing journalist investigating a hacker whose computer virus has compromised the security of prisons in Australia and the US. In this interview with NPR, Carey discusses Julian Assange (“[he] really was the reason I started writing the book, but I didn’t want to write about Assange”), Facebook (“the naked playground”), and the attack this week on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris (“sickened, afraid, really aware of the nature of the perilous conflicts in the modern world, in big multinational capitals…”). Carey’s other work […]

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. Meet the new year, same as the old year. Wouldn't it be nice to go a month or two w/o anything too horrible happening?— Stephen King (@StephenKing) December 31, 2014 Dan Chiasson on Marlon Brando… “Anyone who has tried to recapture the magic of a joke by retelling it has felt, in miniature, what Brando must have felt in his career.” So writes Dan Chiasson in a deft summary of what made Marlon Brando great, and then kinda not so great, in this week’s New York Review of Books. He’s writing about Susan L. Mizruchi‘s new book, Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work (Norton, 2014), which excavates some pretty entertaining factoids along the way. Did you know that Brando was the favorite actor of the National Theater for the Deaf? “They always understood exactly what he was expressing,” writes Mizruchi. Her book, Chiasson proclaims, “is a gallant attempt to rescue Brando from the spectacle of his late career[, which was in turn] a test of whether his greatness could survive the most ingenious forms of sabotage he could […]