I got hooked on Sittenfeld’s realistic potrayal of the female heart and mind around two years ago when i picked up her debut novel, Prep. After speed reading that book in under two days, the author just happened to be in town for a reading of her sophomore book, Man of my Dreams. In person Sittenfeld is self deprecating, witty and low key – you instantly feel like you’ve been pals with her for years. And she answered all my annoying questions about her so called ‘beef’ with New Yorker darling, Nell Freudenberger (Read her Salon article NOW). Basically i’m urging everyone to get stuck into some Sittenfeld prose ASAP…can’t you hear the urgency in my tone?

American Wife

Ooh and if you’re like me and love knowing what books are piled up next to your favourite authors bed then check out Ms. Sittenfeld’s selects on the Barnes & Noble site!

kurtney x courtney love

i am known for my bookwhorish ways, in the spirit of slutting between a million books here is a sampling of current other reads:

David Boring by  Daniel Clowes x I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley x The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon X Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion X The Quality Of life Report by Meghan Daum X The Corrections by Joanthan Franzen X Sleepwalking by Adrian Tomine wah!

in the mean time:

gotta read american wife y'all

PS the caption on this would have been funnier if it were her man in da campaign

So far, so dope and i am obsessed with the name Galt Niederhoffer.

Le premise: basically poppa barnacle wants his six little women to compete for his fortune, like king lear of the upper west side .

PS  i adore this image of king lear and the fool by William Dyce:

The Life You Can Save is the brand new book (just seven days old) from Melbourne’s very own philosophy bad boy; Professor Peter Singer.

Last night Peter spoke to a packed auditorium made up of children, students, professionals, weirdos and a sea of pens and notebooks at his alma mater, Melbourne University. Peter’s message is simple: millions of people are dying every year from preventable and treatable causes, as persons of privilege we are morally obliged to stop these lives being lost.

In Victoria we are currently experiencing the worst bush fires in our state’s history, many lives have been lost, many towns completely destroyed. The donations are flooding in from the Australian general public in the form of money, help, goods and shelter. Professor Peter Singer argues that the same sort of aid should be given to people in need who are not in our own backyards and that we all should be doing this by donating a small percentage of our annual income to an NGO such as Oxfam (there is a scale in the book that recommends donation in relation to income).

I’m sure skeptics and capo fascists are already penning articles and essays attacking the book and the politics of aid etc but at the end of the day it is way too easy to come up with reasons not to part with the cash.

Pledge your donation publicly at: thelifeyoucansave.com

One point the professor made (that really made me feel like a spoiled western chump) is that: wealthy countries are the cause of climate change, we are completely to blame, we have enforced this on the entire world, the end of the world will be our fault. The very least we could do is make sure every single person has water, food and shelter.

More about the book from Text Publishing:

Most of us are absolutely certain that we wouldn’t hesitate to save a drowning child, and that we would do it at considerable cost to ourselves. Yet while thousands of children die each day, we spend money on things we take for granted, and would hardly miss if they were not there. Is that wrong? If so, how far does our obligation to the poor go?

According to the World Bank 1.4 billion people live on less than US$1.25 per day. This entails a vast amount of suffering and avoidable loss of life. The Life You Can Save offers a solution to world poverty. With his trademark clarity, logic and intellectual flair Peter Singer shows us not only that this solution is possible, but also that we have a moral obligation to be part of it.

All author royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to Oxfam. Five per cent of Text Publishing’s revenue from this book will be donated to Hamlin Fistula Relief & Aid Fund.

This cover blows my mind and eyeballs!  The little blonde plaited witch has total Rhoda-The Bad Seed vibes: 

Today it is 44 degrees celsius in Melbourne. My city is burning like ‘the roof, the roof is on fire’ x melting like a candlelit ice-cream cake.

I am going to find me a copy of James H. Schmitz’s sci-fi wonder and lay in bed till the sun goes to sleep.

sidebar: i find it really annoying that 10 million pictures of nick cave pop up when you search for ‘the’ ‘bad’ ‘seed’ or ‘the’ ‘birthday’ ‘party’, can the kids at google invent some sort of ‘this came first/the original and the best’ search function? 

Listening to: hot in herre - nelly

Finally, a book to big screen adaptation that actually excites me and no, it is not from super producer Scott Rudin’s slate.

Howl: the movie (i love writing that, it’s funny) has just been announced and to work out if it is going to rule or suck I did a little mathematics:

James Franco + Rob Epstein + Alan Alda + Mary Louise Parker + Paul Rudd + Jeff Daniels X Allen Ginsberg to the power of Juicy Court Room Drama = HOWL:THE MOVIE

therefore it should rule!

Slash film or / film says:

The actors will portray real-life characters involved in a 1957 obscenity trial, which saw the publisher of Ginsberg’s epic, landmark poem, “Howl,” forced to defend the work’s graphic descriptions of homosexual acts and its merit to society. The court ultimately decided in the publisher’s favor. The indie feature marks the debut of documentarians, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who co-directed the homosexuality-in-film doc, The Celluloid Closet. Epstein also directed The Times of Harvey Milk, which won the 1985 Oscar for Best Documentary, and Gus Van Sant, who directed Franco in this year’s Milk, is producing Howl.

Howl is set to be released in 2011, obviously it could all fall down before this time but for now I don’t have anything sassy to say.

INTERVIEWER: Did the “lost generation” attitude you speak of have a detrimental effect on your own work?

PARKER: Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to be. Dammit, it was the twenties and we had to be smarty—I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.

When I first came across the interview archives over at The Paris Review i didn’t visit a single other website (excluding the google family of course) for a whole week. It is like crack. It is like woah!

The interview roll call is plain ridiculous: Faulkner, Eliot, Calvino, Mailer, Beckett, Marquez, Vonnegut, Hemmingway, Ellison, Carver etc etc

The excerpt above is from an 1956 interview with madame parker, it’s everything you want an interview to be.

Download the complete Dorothy Parker interview (pdf) from The Paris Review NOW.

Interview also available in in The Paris Review Interviews, I available now from Picador.

The Paris Review website will be getting it’s own post soon…. so i’m not going to spend much time explaining why it’s one of the greatest gifts to the interweb here.  I will say that the site is crazy, sexy, cool (TPR = TLC) and it has merch, MERCH!

i heart the paris review 4 eva

“people have been reading books for millions of years… and with new techonology, now people can write them too.”

&

“me is gunna’ write a book version of the film lord of the rings”

But,

then you find a five minute piece of spectacular ghetto- nerd fiction and it’s worth all the drama (or in my case anxiety X compulsive bookmarking).

the new yorker + courtney presents: ALMA by Junot Diaz

PS- this drawing gets me ‘excited’.

It was created by this man

PPSS: i am mad crushing on Junot Diaz, there will be much + much more JD news/discussion/love at & on: this is not a book club