Lovers of George Saunders, your long national nightmare is finally over. After 25 years of publishing his signature brand of off-the-wall short fiction, this master of the short story has delivered unto his fans “Lincoln in the Bardo,” […]
Category: Serious Literature
A Preemptive Review of Milo Yiannopoulis’s New Book
(Editor’s Note: Yesterday, Simon & Schuster paid a reported $250,000 to acquire the publishing rights to Dangerous, a book about “free speech” by Milo Yiannopoulis, a mentally ill Lance Bass impersonator. Having already read Mien Kampf twice, I have no […]
Positively Blorth Street
Earlier today, the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Robert Allen Zimmerman, a folk singer who performs under the name Bob Dylan. The Swedish Academy cited Dylan for “having created new poetic expressions […]
We Need To Talk About Lionel
Two weeks ago, at The Brisbane Writers Festival, the novelist Lionel Shriver was scheduled to give an address on themes of “community and belonging,” a lustrous irony in light of the speech that the writer […]
BPoFD Recommends: Fruition of the Damned
After eight long years of development, Fruition of the Damned, a fantasy graphic novel designed specifically for the web, released its first chapter this morning. Spanning over 150 pages of original artwork, Prelude to Rapture ingeniously eschews […]
The Strawberry Criterion: Go Set A Watchman
More than half a century separates the publication of Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee’s intriguingly flawed second novel, from the release of To Kill a Mockingbird, its beloved predecessor, in July, 1960, and it will likely take an […]
Stop. Fucking. Buying. Shit. From. Amazon.
The Everything Store, Brad Stone’s sweeping account of Amazon’s rise from prescient concept to pervasive corporation, uses for its epigraph a quote from the company’s eccentric founder, Jeff Bezos. Originally delivered as a part of his […]
The Strawberry Criterion: Purity
The first mention of birdwatching in Purity, the fifth novel from Jonathan Franzen, occurs less than five pages from the beginning, in a short aside about the title character’s mother. Then surprisingly, for nearly 500 pages, […]
Leave Jonathan Franzen Alone
The first sentence of “Father Away,” Jonathan Franzen’s essay about spreading the ashes of David Foster Wallace off the coast of Masafuera, ingeniously ends with the word “lobsters.” Over the course of seven clauses, Franzen semantically ferries […]
baby pictures of famous dictators 