ReadEasy: a literary submarine cruising the depths of the internet. This week: writers recommend writers. That’s nice. Read on for top tips for #FridayReads et al from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Margaret Attwood, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Sedaris.   (Pause to get a coffee. This is not part of the found object. :] ) NB the gold standard for #TwitterFiction is Jennifer Egan's "Black Box."— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) May 13, 2015 …written during the Twitter Fiction Festival. Very well, Margaret: here is Jennifer Egan‘s “Black Box“.   Knausgaard recommends… Holly Hunter, Brandon J. Dirden and Corey Stoll were the readers at Symphony Space’s packed-out “Evening with Karl Ove Knausgaard” last Wednesday, which also featured an interview with the man himself, nimbly, wittily conducted by Hari Kunzru. “I wanted to be a writer for almost all the wrong reasons,” the great Norwegian confessed to Kunzru; “I had failed as a rock musician.” Rock music’s loss was literature’s gain — Zadie Smith has compared Knausgaard to crack, and others are just as ecstatic. All this despite the critical near-consensus (bordering on cliché) that his six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle (published in hardback by Archipelago Books and in paperback by FSG) is in many ways quite banal. […]

ReadEasy is a new feature for 2015, diving for pearls in a sea of noise. John Adams's "dazzling portrait of virtuosic femininity" @nyphil this week: http://t.co/MxhTjO85CI (Photo: Chris Lee) pic.twitter.com/1hpW8FVS4r— House of SpeakEasy (@SpeakEasy_House) March 29, 2015 Stephen Kotkin and Slavoj Zizek on Stalin… On Tuesday night in the New York Public Library’s beautiful (but chilly) Celeste Bartos Forum, Paul Holdengraber invited Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek to interview historian Stephen Kotkin about his new book Stalin, Volume 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (The Penguin Press, 2014), and, in his famous formulation, “make the lions roar.” (An appropriate setting, it turned out, as Kotkin did much of his research in the NYPL.) In front of an excited and packed house, Zizek was typically ebullient (“I have so many provocative questions!”) and Kotkin an excellent foil, answering questions from both his co-host and the audience methodically and humorously. Particularly entertaining was his slideshow of scenes from Stalin’s early life (“This is Stalin’s birth-hovel… Notice the attitude, aged ten…”) Zizek suggested that the strength of Kotkin’s new study lies in its refusal to fall into the trap of seeking a “bourgeois, liberal secret” that explains away Stalin’s pathology. This is no mean feat; as Kotkin pointed out, “in history, […]

ReadEasy is a new feature for 2015… because you’re worth it. I love Daily Savings Time. No matter what the weather, it makes me feel like spring is here!!!— Danielle Steel (@daniellesteel) March 10, 2015 Naomi Klein on climate change… In an edited excerpt from her new book This Changes Everything (Simon & Schuster, 2014) over at the Guardian, Klein debunks a series of clichés about our collective failure to tackle climate change (it’s too hard, politically and technologically; we’re screwed anyway…) and argues forcefully for action. After all, the stakes, as she points out, couldn’t be much higher: “entire nations could be saved from the waves.” So, what’s wrong with us? It’s Klein’s contention that “market fundamentalism,” the reigning ideology for the entire period of time since the scope of the global-warming threat became apparent, has “systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change.” Globalization and its attendant forces have accelerated global warming and left us in an appalling bind: “the things we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic […]

ReadEasy is a new feature for 2015 — because life’s hard enough already, amIright? https://twitter.com/jenniferweiner/status/570321074988175360 Last Wednesday Tom McCarthy joined Dennis Lim, director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to discuss his new novel, Satin Island (Knopf, 2015), and to screen two avant-garde classics he considers to be in conversation with it: Antony Balch’s 1963 Towers Open Fire, starring William S. Burroughs, and Johan Grimonprez’s 1997 hijacking documentary, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. It was an extraordinary evening, with McCarthy and Grimonprez (a surprise and very welcome additional guest) at ease in an eclectic and ever-expanding frame of reference: Marvell, Spinoza, Cocteau, Tarkovsky, Lévi-Strauss, Warhol… Quoting Don DeLillo, in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Grimonprez’s narrators comment on the capacity of terrorists for “raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.” While the figure of the terrorist haunted McCarthy’s debut novel, Remainder (2005), it’s the figure of the Writer, Inc. — in the form of corporate anthropologist U. — who’s at the center of Satin Island. The migration of ideas from universities into corporations, appalling to some, is evident in the metaphors for contemporary being that emerge in U.’s digressive narration: metadata, buffering, and so on. It’s an excellent novel. Grimonprez and McCarthy also screened the promotional short […]

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy does the hard work so you don’t have to. Twenty minutes ago, I pressed SEND on my new book. NOW what shall I do?— Joanne Harris (@Joannechocolat) February 22, 2015 Also, totally read our reviews of Oscar-winning movies Boyhood, Whiplash, and Ida. Wanna see tomorrow’s prize-winners today? Buy tickets for No Return, our next Seriously Entertaining show at City Winery NYC, on March 9. Guests include horror maestro R.L. Stine (who we interviewed here), author and journalist Ben Yagoda (whose new book The B-Side we just reviewed), novelist Ian Caldwell, poet A.E. Stallings, and Colbert Report and SNL writer Meredith Scardino. Is everyone watching the Oscars? Best line so far: "it takes balls to wear a dress like that."— Anne Rice (@AnneRiceAuthor) February 23, 2015 “How swiftly it both dulls the senses and raises your ire”: Gary Shteyngart watches Russian TV for a week… “With the exception of fishing, soccer and the Orthodox Church,” writes Shteyngart in the New York Times Magazine, “few things are taken more seriously in Russia than Eurovision.” This is why, he says, 2014 winner Conchita Wurst, an Austrian drag queen, met with such violent disgust in Russia, a country which refuses “to succumb to the rest of the world’s wimpy notions of tolerance.” New Year’s Eve on Russian TV […]

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is a weekly boat trip up the crazy river of the internet. How do YOU celebrate Friday the 13th? I always eat a live chihuahua. How about you?— R.L. Stine (@RL_Stine) February 13, 2015 …and if you enjoyed that: R.L. Stine joins our fabulous line-up for No Return on March 9 at City Winery! Also appearing will be author and journalist Ben Yagoda, playwright Sarah Ruhl, poet A.E. Stallings, and Colbert Report and SNL writer Meredith Scardino. Buy tickets now! Katherine Heiny on Ira Levin… “Ira Levin is subtle in the way a vodka Collins is subtle,” says Heiny in The Atlantic: “you’re innocently going along, thinking wow, this a light refreshing drink and the next thing you know, you wake up in bed with the pizza delivery guy and no idea where your clothes are.” Rereading The Stepford Wives (1972), Heiny offers an appreciation of Levin’s uncanny drip-feed approach to narrative detail, rewarding both the observant and the repeat reader. “These details need to be subtle enough that the reader risks missing them — because life rarely hits us over the head — but they should also contain great significance for someone who’s looking or listening closely.” Some of these can be direct borrowings from life: “I remember a […]

A new feature for 2015, in ReadEasy we search the book stacks of the internet so you don’t have to. Just looked up THE FIRST BAD MAN on Amazon. It has 10 five star reviews and 10 one star reviews. Will check back in a few mos 2 see who won.— Miranda July (@Miranda_July) February 6, 2015 Hey! Buy tickets for our next show, No Return, here. It’s on March 9 at City Winery NYC, and will feature the talents of author and journalist Ben Yagoda, playwright Sarah Ruhl, poet A.E. Stallings, best-selling horror author R.L. Stine, and Colbert Report and SNL writer Meredith Scardino. Darryl Pinckney on Selma… In this week’s New York Review of Books, Darryl Pinckney puts Selma, Ava DuVernay’s new movie about the voting rights marches in Alabama in 1965, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., to the historical-critical test. How much is really factual? Pinckney examines King’s relationship with President Johnson (read also The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson on why Selma is “more than fair to LBJ”), and fleshes out some of the movie’s minor characters, whose screen time inevitably elides their contribution to history. Most telling, though, are the passages on Dr. King’s infidelities. […]

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is us foraging through the underbrush of the World Wide Web so you don’t have to. I'm working on my cabaret act, which is me just singing songs from Warner Brothers cartoons passionately in order to annoy my kids.— Elizabeth McCracken (@elizmccracken) January 31, 2015 Katy Steinmetz on the power of words… Perhaps you read transgender teen Leelah Alcorn‘s suicide note recently. A horrifying jolt to many of its readers, Leelah’s call for a “fix” for society found sympathetic ears on the internet tragically too late for its author. Perhaps not coincidentally, President Obama just became the first president of the United States to use the word “transgender” in a State of the Union address (see context, right). As Katy Steinmetz writes in TIME, “The issues of validity and legitimacy are huge ones for transgender people.” The significance of even such a casual reference as this, she argues — the power of a single usage — could prove immeasurable. “To have Obama offer up recognition using the word that the community itself uses — rather than circling the issue with some vague phrase like ‘regardless of how someone identifies’ — is him implying that […]

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular scrapbook of peculiarisms, thoughts, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. I love Twitter the most during events like #sotu -- it was so lonely before this, listening in the void.— Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) January 21, 2015 Björk‘s Vulnicura was released on iTunes two months early last week after leaking online, and music critics, many approaching rapture, have risen nobly to the challenge of describing this dense, intense new album. Ann Powers over at NPR, in an excellent essay on Vulnicura‘s relationship with melodrama, closes in on Björk’s singing of the word emotional: “Climbing it like one of the cliffs she often evokes in her pastoral lyrics, she lets it open up like a vista on its central, circulatory ‘o.’ The word becomes a Valkyrie’s cry, a statement of purpose both sacred and humanly thrilling.” Jon Pareles in The New York Times: “[The songs] linger in dissonance and ambiguous tonality… The physicality of Björk’s voice and the strings are even more striking against the impersonal electronic sounds, all the better to reveal the interior landscape of heartbreak and healing.” Coup of the week, though, goes to Jessica Hopper at Pitchfork, whose […]