Asymptote: October 2014 Issue

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A new October issue of Asymptote is available, featuring Shi Tiesheng, Odires Mlászho, Hirato Renkichi, Tedi López Mills, Erik Langkjær on Flannery O'Connor, Mohammed Said Abdulla and Euphrase Kezilahabi. Check it out. [Read More]

Flannery O'Connor on Ayn Rand

From a letter to a friend

Flannery O'Connor

From a letter to a friend, dated 31 May 1960 (via Open Culture):

I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Flannery O'Connor, The Cartoons
• Linda Grant on Jean Rhys
• Women Writers Who Drank
• Dorothy Parker Telegram
• The Madness of Queen Jane

Bret Easton Ellis talks to Matthew Specktor

An interview for Salon.com

Bret Easton Ellis (left) and Matthew Specktor (right)

From Salon.com:

Matthew Specktor and Bret Easton Ellis have known one another for 20 years. Neither of them can remember how they met. “I think it was at the Bowery Bar in New York,” Specktor says. “But that could just be a mathematical probability.”

Approximate generational peers, Ellis grew up in Sherman Oaks, Specktor in Santa Monica. These were two different versions of the same city. On a recent Friday night they sat down at the Polo Lounge, a Beverly Hills landmark that seemed as good a place as any for the two writers to drink martinis (Hendricks gin, with cucumbers) and talk about Los Angeles, writing, Twitter and Specktor’s new book, “American Dream Machine.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Bret Easton Ellis talks to NUVO Magazine
• Schrader and Ellis to collaborate on The Canyons (2013)
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

First Author Photographs of Famous Writers

Flavorwire compiles a list of their favourite dust jacket photographs

Emily Temple (Flavorwire): 'Authors have to be pretty careful about the photos they choose to have on their dust jackets. Not only is it remarkably easy to fall prey to one of those pesky author photo clichés, but those first baby-faced pictures that grace debut novels might just go down in history — if they’re lucky. To that end, we scoured the web to pull together a few surprising, intense, and charmingly youthful author photos from some of our very favorite authors’ first works' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Faber & Faber Writers' Gallery
• Portraits of Beckett as a Famous Writer
• Gordon Ball: Beat Generation Photographs
• Burroughs 23: Charles Gatewood's Photographs of William S. Burroughs
• Writers: Philip Roth

Flannery O'Connor, The Cartoons

A new publication from Fantagraphics

Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons

From Fantagraphics Books (link via Espen Terjesen): 'Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, the first book devoted to the author’s work in the visual arts, emphasizes O’Connor’s most prolific period as a cartoonist, drawing for her high school and college publications in the early 1940s.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Lost Art of William S. Burroughs' Ah Pook Is Here
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• Thomas Bernhard: Graphic Essay
• Introducing... Franz Kafka