The independent Manhattan movie house Film Forum has decided to pull its advertising from the Village Voice, citing concerns about Backpage.com, the classifieds site owned by Voice parent company Village Voice Media.
Longtime Film Forum director Karen Cooper told Off the Record that Nicholas Kristof’s Friday op-ed in The New York Times prompted her decision. Read More
A hedge fund manager wants assurances that Norman Mailer's curious apartment in Brooklyn Heights complies with zoning codes before he buys it. Or maybe he just found out that Mailer stabbed one of his wives with a penknife there. In any case, the buyer appears to have cold feet. Occupy Norman Mailer's apartment? [NYT]
Book Riot is a book site for 18 to 34-year-olds. As this article points out, it does not seem to have made up its mind whether it's for adults who like to read, or for adults who hate to read (viz. "Charles Dickens is reigning king of Dead White Guys You Should Have Read in High School, But Probably Just Read the Cliff Notes or Possibly Watched the BBC Mini-series.") Read More
Norman Mailer's novel about a director on the Hollywood Blacklist in the 1950s is now in development as a film, reports The Daily. The novel was originally adapted for the screen by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne in the 1980s for producer Elliott Kastner, but it was never made. Now Michael ("son of") Read More
In a back nook of Elaine’s someone had placed a blown-up old cover of Quest magazine featuring the chiseled features of Chuck Pfeiffer. “CHUCK,” the headline read, “MYTHICAL MADMAN WARRIOR.”
“Seventy, it’s an odd age,” Mr. Pfeiffer told The Observer, staring at the younger version of himself, a decoration for his birthday party last Read More
Not to start the new year off on a dour note, but do you want to know why so many people have become hopeless about changing the political and economic mechanisms that rule our lives? Watch the 1969 True Grit and then go see the Coen brothers' recent remake, which has just about all the Read More
Last night, at the 2nd annual Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony gala, Tom Wolfe gave a warm and witty introduction for Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner, who was receiving a Lifetime Achievement in Magazine Publishing award. It was held at Cipriani 42nd, where the tree-trunked corinthian columns rose breathtakingly toward the ceiling's Read More
Out of nowhere in Rick Moody's new novel The Four Fingers of Death, there is a gay sex scene involving two astronauts flying on a rocket ship to Mars. "There was a sharp stabbing sensation, sort of how I imagine it must feel to find your innards impaled on a pike," Mr. Moody writes. Read More
A couple of weeks ago on the op-ed page of The New York Times, Camille Paglia declared Americans sexually dead. Some months before that, the essayist Katie Roiphe declared male American novelists literarily dead in the description-of-sex department. Just about a year ago, the critic Cristina Nehring published a book, The Vindication of Love, Read More
Apparently frustrated Manhattanites aren't the only ones crawling eastbound along Montauk Highway in the heat of the summer, now at least their art can inch along next to them.
A few summers ago, with the advent of Petney--the Jitney-comparable branch of Pet Taxi--pet owners traveling east by no-dogs-allowed means were afforded the option of sending their Read More
In a sit down with the Big Think, Normal Mailer's son, John Buffalo Mailer, defended his dad against the charge that the hard-drinking writer had no sense of humor.
"Oh, my God. I mean, if anything his problem was that he didn't realize that humor will not translate in sound bites and quotes and so Read More
On the first page of the index to A Ticket to the Circus—the new memoir by Norris Church Mailer, sixth wife and widow to Norman Mailer—the eye is drawn to the name Saul Bellow. Did the two titans slug it out in some literary feud? Turn to page 315 and you find a quarrel of Read More
The New York Times' Richard Goldstein reports that former light-heavyweight champion and author José Torres has died in Ponce, Puerto Rico. He was 72-years-old.
Mr. Torres, whose professional heyday was between 1958 and 1969 (YouTube has a couple of clips: Torres v. Carl 'Bobo' Olson in 1964; Torres v. Willie Pastrano from Read More
The lucky winner of the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award will be announced this week. The award was established in 1993 by the late Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn) in the quixotic hope that it would dissuade writers from introducing “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise Read More
John Koblin looks at editors who moonlight as writers, and talks to The New Yorker's David Remnick who says, "As much as I love editing, reporting and writing is a way for me to get out of the house a little bit, metaphorically... Otherwise, it’s just the apartment and the office." Plus: As Read More
Last week, a professor from Pennsylvania named Michael Lennon sold a book to Simon & Schuster about his old friend Norman Mailer. It’s a biography, this book—one that Mailer authorized Mr. Lennon to write before he died last November at the age of 84. Simon & Schuster is reportedly paying Mr. Lennon $800,000 for his Read More
