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.

Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, and other famous writers narrate the funny pages.

Some NaNoWriMo tips from Mark Sample: Use foreshadowing to hint what’s to come. E.g., have the vampire say “I want to suck your blood” before he sucks blood. And: Add tension by making the gender of your narrator indeterminate. This works for race too. And age. And number of nipples.

Another (more serious) NaNo tip: write slowly.

The Millions thinks the recent film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are made a better trailer than it did a feature film.

Is Stephen King the most underrated novelist of our time?

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This is your brain on books.

Jane Austen’s Emma comes to the big screen…in Bollywood. I am very excited to see Emma and Mr. Knightley dance and sing. For reals.

O helo thar: a good old fashioned book burnin’ at a Baptist Church in North Carolina. Books to be burned include such “heretical works” as Rick Warren, Mother Theresa, and, uh, the Bible. Book burning: ur doin it rong.

Maurice Sendak says he does “not tolerate” the opinion that Where the Wild Things Are is too scary for children, and concerned parents should “go to hell.”

The question is asked, again: is Twitter ruining literacy? We say, again: nope.

Boys like zombies because they’re both “dumb, brutal, ugly, and mindlessly violent.” Girls like vampires because they’re a proxy for the gay men they secretly want to date. Okay.

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Imagine you are a doctor. Let’s say you have known you wanted to be a doctor ever since you were a little kid, attended many years of school to become a doctor, and experience the greatest possible level of joy and fulfillment in your life when you are practicing medicine. However, let’s say that the society in which you live expects doctors to work for free. Occasionally doctors can secure gigs that pay, but it’s normal for doctors to hold down other jobs so that they can support themselves enough to practice medicine. As such, a typical day for a doctor could include: getting up early, enduring a long commute, spending 8 hours in an office working a job that consumes energy yet doesn’t stimulate intellectually, grabbing some dinner after work, and THEN performing open heart surgery at night.

This is what it can feel like to be an artist, especially in New York City.

Of course we need doctors and they perform a very important job…but so do artists. And we need artists, too. Yet it has become the accepted norm that most artists must work a support job in order to survive. This reality can be frustrating, depressing, and is something I think about a lot when I realize that yet another week has passed and I have poured far more energy into my “support job” than I have into my writing. I recently ran across a great article by Emily St. John Mandel on The Millions that explores this very topic.

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