Morning Bites: Murakami and Sam Anderson, Tintin, naked parties, George Saunders, and more

Sam Anderson and Haruki Murakami hanging out, doing stuff and whatnot.

• George Saunders talks to The New Yorker about his story in this week’s issue, Tenth of December.

• “[H]e was what you’d get if you combined Walter Cronkite with Colonel Sanders. He had his eccentricities. At his Cape Cod summer houses he liked to throw nude cocktail parties that often ended in unexpected couplings amid the dunes.” – Dwight Macdonald and his new “greatest-hits assemblage,” Masscult And Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (NYRB Classics), gets the back page treatment by the NYT Book Review.

• The Incongruous Quarterly is seeking submissions of unpublishable poetry, fiction and art for our fourth issue.  They’re from Canada, which means that probably they’re nice people.

• The lost art of bookplates, and a new book about them by Martin Hopkinson (Yale University Press).

• Did Spielberg screw up Tintin?

• Comic book characters react to Occupy Wall Street.

• The lead singer of The Horrors likes The Kinks and Sleep.  Good taste.

Who will Criticize the Critics?

Posted by Jason Diamond

Things I picked up and though about while reading the NY Times Sunday Book Review series of essays, “Why Criticism Matter” this morning.

Bites: Polish Crime Covers, Lit in the 00’s, David Foster Wallace, Pacino as Shylock, and More

Over at The Rumpus, we learn that Poland just knows how to do sweet cover art for their crime novels.

At New York Magazine, Sam Anderson rips into the 00’s.  Appearances by David Foster Wallace, Junot Díaz. Bolaño, Eggers, P.G. Wodehouse, Borges, and Wilde.   A nod to N+1, a short drive into Kindle territory, and then ends by again talking about the same book that started him on the whole conversation: Infinite Jest.

Most of the book’s action appears to take place in 2009, which means that we’ve all just survived the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. It also means that David Foster Wallace’s prophetic window has now (at least in the most literal sense) closed forever, in the same way Orwell’s did when we reached the actual 1984.

Lit.

• Speaking of David Foster Wallace, a story of his is in the newest issue of The New Yorker.

• “For me, it was a dream come true to design the last first edition by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.” — Chip Kidd,  about designing the cover for The Original of Laura.

• Scott Esposito gives us his favorite reads of the year.

• The Atlantic is going to start selling short stories on Kindle.

• Just in time for Amazon trying to get off the computer

In case you need to know where to find the indie-lit secret Santa program that is perfect for you…

• Just go to The Scowl.  #1 and #2

Also, Hanukkah is right around the corner…

• And while this has nothing to do with the Maccabees defending the Temple, Al Pacino is going to play one of the most famous Jews in literature.

• A diamond dreidel.  Awesome.
  

More awesome.

• If you miss Sarah Palin with a tomato, but hit a cop, I think you still get points.

• The Young and Hungry pick their top ten plates of 2009.

• Hollister Hovey throwing a Christmas party.