We understand that Dickens intended A Christmas Carol to be, in part, a critique of class power dynamics. And that the reprehensible-but-ultimately-redeemed Ebenezer Scrooge is supposed to symbolize some kind of hardened capitalist. But no matter how totally 1% the dude was, he had a point when it came to…
Dogs are not only man’s best friend, but also man’s most alive accessory. Walk down Lincoln Road and you see an assortment of unnatural relationships people have with their four-legged beast companions. Why are we so in love with our canine pets? Mark Derr, a Miami Beach resident, asks this question in…
If you have never been to the Miami Book Fair, may we suggest you do. Not a huge fan of books? Neither are we. We CliffNoted our way through college. And if it isn’t written by a celebrity, we probably want nothing to do with it. Which is exactly why…
Michael Moore closed out the 28th edition of the Miami Book Fair last night with a standing-room-only discussion promoting his new book Here Comes Trouble. The book is a collection of non-fiction stories and anecdotes from the filmmakers life. The event started 30 minutes late. The crowd was surprisingly older…
Chapman, the biggest auditorium on the Book Fair grounds, was packed. It was a young crowd, pretty white for Miami, one might think they were in Austin or Portland. In Hipster-biblio-ville, there’s plenty of plaid and an army of bespectacled soldiers. Chuck Palahniuk walked on stage to a thunderous cheer. Wearing…
As much as he loved visiting Hogwarts, something always bugged author Lev Grossman when he worked his way through J.K. Rowling’s epic.”I found it really odd that Potter never seemed to have read C.S. Lewis growing up. No one in his world seems to have ever read any fiction at…
What would happen if Judy Blume rewrote Dante’s Inferno to star a sexually repressed teenager who thinks she’s in hell for overdosing on pot? There’s only one author alive qualified to tackle that question; luckily Chuck Palahniuk, maverick author of Fight Club and Choke, decided to give it a shot…
Nicole Krauss will break your heart. You’ll be reading one of her novels and suddenly the pages will be damp. Confused, you’ll check the page number — 12 — and swear to yourself that you couldn’t possibly be weeping before even learning the narrator’s name. But you are. Don’t worry. It’s…
On a recent episode of Chelsea Lately, Handler discussed the literary success of Are You There Vodka? It’s Me Chelsea. When one of her guests brought up the fact that Handler had topped the New York Times’ Best-Seller list, the show’s host quickly added, “Yeah, so did Snooki.” She’s right,…
Miami Book Fair 2011: Chuck Palahniuk, Nicole Krauss, street festival Nov. 18-20
Adam Mansbach’s children’s-book-not-for-children Go the Fuck to Sleep reads like The Very Hungry Caterpillar according to Lenny Bruce. A taste: “The owls fly forth from the treetops. Through the air, they soar and they sweep. A hot crimson rage fills my heart, love. For real, shut the fuck up and…
It would be easier to begrudge Téa Obreht’s extraordinary success at such a young age if her writing weren’t so damn good.Her debut, The Tiger’s Wife — published last year when she was just 24 — is the hauntingly beautiful tale of Natalia, a young Yugoslavian doctor, struggling to understand…
Ever wish you had taken the time to really get to know author and filmmaker John Sayles? Like, really get to know him, not just re-Tumblr his ROFLcopters or poke him on Facebook? This week, Sayles is giving the Magic City a mighty stone — that is, two separate appearances…
We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief; the great debate as to which 50 American writers are the absolute funniest of all time has finally ended. Andy Borowitz’s new book, The 50 Funniest American Writers (Library of America), is a collection of hilarious pieces ranging from O. Henty’s…
“Comics are words and pictures,” opined the late Harvey Pekar, comic book writer, critic and cult-personality. “You can make anything with words and pictures.” For over three decades — as the writer (and main character) of navel-gazing indie comic book American Splendor — Pekar’s life was dedicated to the infinite…
Postmodernism is slipperier than a greased watermelon. Society used to have simple standards and reasonable expectations: up was up, men and women were men and women, and fiction tidily progressed from beginning to end in a linear fashion. But then Postmodernism — the literary and arts movement that threw out…
There’s nothing worse than having a holiday dinner — or a funeral, or a wedding — to force you to spend an extended and unnecessary amount of time with your family. Unless you happen to be forced to do that by a hurricane, which, in turn, forces you to confront…
As part of the University of Wynwood reading series, poet Roger Reeves is appearing at Lester’s Bar this Friday. UW founder P. Scott Cunningham recently spotted Reeves at a writers’ conference. He was impressed by the poet’s intellect and charisma, noting “His work combines formal rigor and contemporary speech that…
At the end of Michael Moore’s remarkable documentary Roger & Me, the filmmaker corners former General Motors CEO Roger Smith and asks him if he’d visit a family who’d been evicted from their home in Flint, Michigan. Smith’s decision to shut down several plants in the city cost 30,000 folks…
The inimitable Miami Book Fair is just around the corner. For those who say that Miami is a cultural wasteland, we say, “phooey!” For an intellectual vortex, we sure get lucky hosting the best, brightest, and biggest names in the literary world every year.And that is why the coolest, edgiest,…
Colson Whitehead, best known for his 2009 novel Sag Harbor, recently released a novel about zombies, Zone One. The book challenges literary conventions and may very well represent a change in perspective from the literary establishment toward genre novels. Spanning three days in a post-apocalyptic world, the story deftly handles traditional…
When we interviewed Karen Russell about her debut novel Swamplandia!, we characterized her fiction as swamp gothic – equal parts adventure and macabre. But when Hollywood types got a hold of this story set in South Florida, they saw comedy. HBO has picked up Swamplandia, a half-hour comedy series based…
