Some reimagined Kerouac’s masterpiece for bros. Do you think this will reignite the love of reading in the contemporary gorilla juice head?

Some samples:

1 – Epic Beginnings

I first met Dean not long after Tryscha and I hooked up. I had just gotten over a wicked fucking hangover that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with a six-foot-five douchebag and a beer bong. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the bro’d. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see hot LA actress chicks and try In N’ Out burgers, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect bro for the road because he knows how to fucking party. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who’d shown me a few Facebook status updates written by Dean from the Arizona State Beta Phi Omega house. I was totally stoked about Dean’s status updates because they were funny as shit, asking Chad to rate some pictures of girls he hooked up with the night before. At one point, Carlo Marx and I texted about the status updates and wondered if we would ever meet the epic Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the crazy fucking jagoff he is today, when he was a young Communications major shrouded in Axe Body Spray. Then news came that Dean was out of ASU and was transferring to OSU; also there was talk that he was bringing some slam piece named Marylou.

2 – Flipcup and Phoenix

One night I was playing flipcup at the Delta house and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean just got in and was staying at the Holiday Inn Express near East Campus. Dean had arrived the night before, the first time in Columbus, with his hotass stacked trixie Marylou; they got out of his Land Rover and cut around the corner looking for some grub and went right into Buffalo Wild Wings, and since then B-Dubs has always been a bitchin symbol of Columbus for Dean. They threw down cash on fucking tasty wings and brew-dogs.

All this time Dean was telling Marylou shit like this: “Now, babe, we’re at OSU, and even though I haven’t laid down the plan for you, we gotta forget about whatever stupid shit happened between us in Phoenix and fuckin’ cowboy up and start thinking about how we’re gonna pregame tonight…” and so on in the way that he had in those early days.

3 – A Natty Light-Slugging Hero of the Southwest

I went to the Holiday Inn Express with my buddies, and Dean came to the door in his lacrosse shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean was totally getting his bone on, for to him sex was the one and only clutch thing in life, although he had to work part time at Foot Locker to cover tuition and so on. You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking at his Samsung Galaxy, nodding like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every work, throwing in a thousand “Hell yeas” and “right ons.” I went to the Holiday Inn Express with my buddies, and Dean came to the door in his lacrosse shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean was totally getting his bone on, for to him sex was the one and only clutch thing in life, although he had to go to the gym and do laundry and so on. My first impression of Dean was of a young The Situation—ripped, funny as shit, with spiked hair—a Natty Light-slugging hero of the Southwest. In fact he’d just been in the hospital for alcohol poisoning before hooking up with Marylou and coming to OSU. Marylou was a nine-out-of-ten with a Mystic Tan and a crazy rack; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her iPhone in her hands and her oversized Dolce and Gabana sunglasses on, waiting like a less-hot Megan Fox in that first Transformers movie.  But, outside of being pretty hot, she was a total bitch and capable of being a defcon-one psycho hose-beast. That night we all slammed Bud Light Limes and pulled stop signs out of the curb till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around hung over as shit and watching Sportscenter, Dean got up like a total pimp, paced around, and decided the thing to do was have Marylou get some grub. “In other words we need some breakfast burritos, babe.” She had some kind of bitch-out about it and I peaced out.

A Shore Thing, literary equivalent of Comic Sans and the debut novel of popular circus show reality show star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, heralded in 2011 last week with its release, among other signs of the apocalypse.* If you haven’t read an excerpt, trust that it’s far from a work of literary genius. She appeared the other night on the David Letterman Show to present “top ten reasons to buy the new Snooki book.” I thought of some other reasons.

(The Real) Top 10 Reasons to Buy the New Snooki Book

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Fall of the House of Usher, feat. Lil John, Kafka on the Jersey Shore, and other deliciously awful literary mashups.

A wonderful essay over at The Millions on where we write and on making do with what you’ve got.

Introducing the Facebook novel.

Here’s John Waters’ secret to reading a lot.

What reading challenging books does to your brain. (All good things, I promise.)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame‘s eponymous Quasimodo may have actually been based on a real person.

Would you be seen in public reading science fiction? This lady wouldn’t mind, but then again, I think she’d prefer to read it in private. If you know what I mean. Har.

This whole classic-literature-meets-monsters trend keeps getting weirder and weirder. The latest mashup is Mrs. Darcy vs The Aliens, which author Jonathan Pinnock describes as:

Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens is a slightly demented sequel to Pride and Prejudice, although it has been described more accurately as “not so much Pride and Prejudice‘s sequel as its bastard offspring following a drunken one-night stand with the X-Files.”

Mostly, I like this idea because of the book trailer the author put together. It has Colin Firth in it, it’s in French, and it’s one of the weirdest book trailers I’ve ever seen.

If I could speak with one person dead or alive, I would want to chat with Jane Austen just so I could get her reaction to all these mashups. Given that she was apparently pretty risque and controversial in her day, I have a feeling she would think it all was a very good joke–what do you think?

Laura Miller’s piece in Salon last week touched upon our continued interest in reinventing Jane Austen into what most pleases ourselves. Given the ridiculous success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and multiple vampire books*, there’s been much talk about whether Jane Austen herself would be rolling in her grave, or perhaps amused to see her stories with “ultra violent zombie mayhem.”

I can’t help but wonder though, if we’ve unconsciously brought Jane Austen full-circle. Though Austen never wrote about zombies, her juvenilia is full of scandal — carriage chases, divorce, murder and other mayhem, without always punishing the offending character. (Though this may not sound very scandalous to us, but in Victorian England this was extremely shocking, and to protect her reputation, Austen’s juvenilia was not published by the family until over 100 years later.)

But much like the spirit behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Austen’s humor is tongue-in-cheek, and at 14 she’s already noticed the inordinate number of women who faint in the novels of her time. In Love and Freindship[sic], written when Austen was still a teenager, she writes, Read more »

"The Da Vinci Code" actually translates to "The Of Vinci Code." Which makes no sense. Score one for Dan Brown.

Because they’re just as useful, if not more so, than good books in learning how to write well. See also: How To Write Badly Well.

Because, even if you can’t actually learn anything about writing from them, they can still be a boon to your self-esteem as a writer by comparison.

Because they can (sometimes) be unabashedly guilty pleasures. See also: the Twilight series, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Notebook, anything by Dan Brown.

Because they can be a wonderful source of unintentional humor. See also: Dan Brown’s 20 Worst sentences. This made me laugh for about twenty minutes: Read more »

Edgar Allen Pug

John Pupdike, Edgar Allen Pug, and other literary pets.

The best book covers of 2009.

The origin of modern individual consciousness comes not from great literature, but rather from the humble spaces between words.

Twisted kids’ book parodies: Dude, They’re Going to Chop Your Balls Off!, Horton Hires A Ho!, My First Rave.

A step-by-step guide on how to become the most famous author in the world. Or, a list of everything John Cusack did in 2012.

100 mythical creatures in haiku, once a day from yesterday until March 10.

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Bella was wandering through the forest, talking to herself as she went, till, on turning a sharp corner, she came upon two little men, so suddenly that she could not help starting back, but in another moment she recovered herself, feeling sure they that they must be real.

They were standing under a tree, each with an arm round the other’s neck, and though they had looked very nearly the same from far away, now that she was closer Bella could see that they were rather different indeed, for one of them very pale-skinned and had large, pointy teeth, and the other’s face was covered entirely in russet-coloured fur. “Oh, my!” Bella said to herself. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stranger-looking pair in all my life!”

The little man with the sharp teeth stood very still, and if it wasn’t for his twin distractedly scratching his own fur—”As though he has fleas!” Bella thought with a shudder—she would have quite forgot they were alive. She was just inching her way past the pair, doing her best to keep well away from the flea-ridden one, when she was startled by a voice coming from the little man with the very sharp teeth.

“My name is Edward. And this is Jacob. Who are you?” he said. “And would you tell me, please, why do you smell so very good?” Read more »

“Who’s on first?” “This is it.” “Uh, what?” An imagined conversation in line for the new Michael Jackson movie.

“Demand whether something even EXISTS anymore. This trick works equally well for concepts (i.e., patriotism) and objects (i.e., peanuts).” This and more tips from a schmoozer’s guide to literary gatherings.

OMGZ Twilight Barbie! Bella and Edward! As Barbies! Insert joke here about plastic genitalia/chastity/etc.

When novelists sober up.

I thought this article was about well-rounded heroines in fiction, as in a well-rounded personality. But, no, they’re talking about a well-rounded body. And they’re calling it “chunk lit.”

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