Did you read Rachel Donadio's NYBR back-page essay about literary dealbreakers yet? Or her subsquent Paper Cuts blog post, in which she asked Times readers to state their own literary dealbreakers?

So, what are the most common literary dealbreakers? People who don't read at all, people who love Ayn Rand, people who dote on Harry Potter, people who worship The Da Vinci Code, people who are too pretentious, and people who aren't pretentious enough.

This is one of the best Paper Cuts comment so far (the prose is a bit rough, the ideas are good):

People who reject others for reading a particular book have either:

1) read the book themselves to merit their rejection of its content, in which case they are hyppocrites [sic] for dumping other readers of the same book
2) demonstrated dishonesty and sterotype [sic] by dumping someone based on a book they have never read themselves and of which they cannot, with integrity, state what they object about it.
— Posted by Student

Most of the blog commenters and people quoted in the piece are guilty of both of these points. Donadio is very wise for not coming out and stating her own dealbreakers. She's absolved. Lucky her.

For as long as we can remember worrying about whether were cool, "worthwhile", popular, whatever -- we knew that we would often be judged as such (or not) based on the things we liked. What we read. The music we listened to. The art we admired. Our tastes, the things we enjoy -- now, especially -- define who we are. You don't need to get to know a person in order to peg them based on their Facebook profile, to decide that the last book they posted on their iRead application was way, way below your standards of snobbery, or that they're "A Fan" of a band you outgrew five years before hipster became a New York magazine cover story. It seems that these days, few people can afford to be genuine -- if they want to adequately compete.

It's sad.

If we're honest about what we truly love, and what we truly value -- whether it's a short story by Chekov or a poem by Jewel -- compatability tends to follow suit. And then, if you want to go ahead and judge people for being happy enough to have found each other based on their alleged crappy-ass taste in blogs, well -- that's your perogative, we say! And we say it with a smile.

Instead of inviting you to comment on your literary dealbreakers (snore), if you would like to, please post either the last five books/magazines/comics/whatevs you read (no cheating, even if one of those books was really embarrassing) or a book that you adore that you get a lot of flack about from other people. You don't have to defend it, although you can, if you want to. What's more important is the fact that you like it, regardless of whether anyone else does. If it made you think or feel something, good or bad or in between, we want to know about it.

3/31/2008 12:40:57 PM by Sharon | Comments [2] |  

One of PopSerious's correspondents was at a lecture at Columbia University yesterday, where writer Zadie Smith (White Teeth) gave a lecture on "Feeling Fraudelent." Below, some wise words by the author. We love this kind of thing. So far, the best advice about writing we ever got was "Sometimes you just have to puke over the side and keep rowing." This is close competition:

On the subject of finishing a novel (or for those writers out there squeamish about the N-word, “a piece”), Smith said you should “step away from the vehicle.” Put it in a drawer. Do not publish it–-do not even read it–-until you absolutely have to. The most important reader of your work is not yourself who has written it, or an editor who has seen ten drafts of it already, but a complete stranger, and if you can keep the thing in a drawer long enough chances are that you’ll become that stranger yourself.

3/26/2008 1:54:51 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

You know how sometimes, someone says something that makes your face hot and your hands ball into fists of fury and your face go into perma-scowl only to realize you have let them get away with it?

We do! Oh, we do, we do, WE DO! We have been there again and again, only to lie awake at night thinking of The Brilliant Things We Ought To Have Said. It can be difficult, and sometimes impossible, to snark back. We are rather shy, and these things don't always come easily to us. Our personalities are “confrontationally-challenged,” shall we say, which seems to be a quirk shared by many biliophiles! We’re likely the sort alpha-individuals refer to, smirkingly, as a "meak-voiced door-mat.” Yes, someone said this to us once. It was awful! Our insides were quaking, and yet we were unable to properly defend ourselves! But it doesn’t have to be that way. Help has arrived, friends, and we are delighted to share the news. In this week's fishwrap, we wrote about Lady Arabella Snark's (a/k/a A.C Kemp -- writer, slang expert, and MIT lecturer) The Perfect Insult for Every Occasion. Basically, the book is our NEW BIBLE, and that's not something we admit to lightly. Particularly when our Jewish mom is maybe reading this.

Kemp is extremely funny and clever, and we wished we could tell you more about her book in our little write-up. Fortunately, the Interweb has no space constraints. The Perfect Insult functions as an anti-ettiquite guide, ready to teach you about properly wounding, unconventional put-downs geared toward everyone from passive-agressive fucktards to your douchey co-worker. Also: mean boys, cruel family members, and snobs! There are quizzes and enlightening MENSA-level vocabulary lessons woven through the text. What’s an orchidectimy, you ask? “It sounds like a flower,” Kemp told us. “Or something that would be really nice. Except it’s removing your testes.”

The Perfect Insult is written from the perspective of Lady Snark, a character Kemp created for fun. What a card! What a kick! We heart Miss Snark. And you will, too, if you make the time to see her in her full glory -- engraved flask, elbow-length satin gloves, superior smile and all -- tomorrow at the BU Barnes & Noble (660 Beacon St) at 7 pm. Go! But first, read our interview outtakes with Kemp, in which she discusses her insult collection, the book's upcoming YouTube tie-in, and fake socialites.

How did you come to write the book?
It was kind of an organic thing, I guess. I had taught this slang class to international students and I wanted to write a book for international students on slang. I went to a bunch of publishers and none of them were interested in it. Around the same time I started Slang City, and it was really astonishing to me that most of the people who came to this web site were not international students but native speakers. Then I thought, oh, well I’ll do a book that’s connected to that. I decided on insults. But then, somehow, between the time that I came up with the idea and finishing writing the book it turned into something else. Part of it was that I had written in it in this sort of arch, ironic tone and when my agent took me on he said, Well, why don’t you try assigning an actual character to that voice? And I thought, "Oh, a socialite would be good!" I didn’t know anything about socialites so I read a bunch of books about them.

And was that when it morphed into an anti-ettiquite guide?
Once I started writing it in that voice, it kind of changed the direction. Originally it was just going to be a book about insults and different categories of insults. When I decided to do it that way, it became more of an anti-ettiquite kind of book. I ended up putting other things in, like, you know, information about exotic poisons.

Did you have a running collection of insults to cull from?
A lot of the stuff in the book I had to spend a great deal of time thinking about. The book has a lot of obscure words -- those, I just sort of collected. I hadn’t originally intended to include so many arcane words. But at some point in the early stages of the book I was reading The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. It’s about Edgar Allen Poe and it’s one of those historically based books -- he wrote The Dante Club. So, he had all this vocabulary in there that was sort of the 19th century stuff that nobody uses anymore. And so I started just writing these things down on the backs of envelopes. Every time I would find something funny in a newspaper article or book, I would just write it on the back of an envelope until I had a very large collection of envelopes! Then I just started putting them into the book. Sometimes I would look for something that I had found somewhere else and though, that’s an unusual word. And then I’d go onto the online Oxford English Dictionary and I would find something else by mistake when I was looking for that.

Which section of the book is most dear to Miss Snark?
Well, I think the quiz in which you have to differentiate between grammar terms and sexual perversion and rocks and people from the Bible. That was one of my favorite parts. But the other part that I really liked is the letter on refusing invitations. Last week a bunch of my friends got together and one of my coworkers from MIT shot a video acting that out. I’m going through all of the shots but I’m hoping that in the next couple of weeks we’ll be putting that on YouTube. I was a little nervous to do it and have my friends do it, who were not professional actors, but they were amazing.

Are you planning on dressing up as your nom de plume for author events?
Yes, absolutely. This afternoon one of the tasks on my list is to order an engraved gin flask! She’s one of these people -- and this was something, when I was reading these various socalite books, there were these various real-life characters who had been from this poor background and married someone who was better than them, divorced them, married someone who was better than that, and kept moving themselves up the ladder. Actually, I don’t know if you noticed this but the dedication in the book is to this woman named Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrborn. She was one of the characters that I found, but it was like a one line mention in a book about New York socialites. I looked it up and she was this woman who was a dressmaker, but she called herself a Baroness. She took a couple of her friends and moved to the Galapogos Islands and called herself the Empress of the Galapogos Islands. She would do things like steal her neighbor’s mail, and then charge them for it! When you look at the current socalites -- Paris Hilton? It’s like, that’s not what a socalite is supposed to be!

3/12/2008 5:01:16 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

Kelefa Sanneh, our favorite New York Times pop music critic, is going to be a staff writer at The New Yorker! Now he and the S.F.J. can totally duke it out over the Lil' Mama and Britney coverage. Loving it! Also moving to 4 Times Square is New York magazine writer Ariel Levy, of whose work we are also big fans.

Margaret B. Jones's (not her real name!) Love and Consequences, a memoir about coming-of-age as a penniless, abused foster child in the L.A. gang the Bloods was -- wait for it -- a big, fat lie. Girl got Michiko Kakutani creaming over her writing last week, and she's a stone-faced bullshit artist. Oh, the many ways in which she could have handled this differently. Peggy, did you ever think about writing a non-fiction book based on your friends' accounts, instead of, we don't know, passing them off as your own?!

Remember when we freaked out over that Sloane Crosley profile in the NY Observer? The Most Popular Publicist in the World is back, and her new book is about to come out. The hype machine is nearly short-circuiting itself over her tome? You don't say! We're still really, really excited to read it, though. This is the first personal essay Sloane published, in the Village Voice, and it's very funny and good, so we guess the blurbers are all right. We like her. We can't help it. Please let her survive this ugly process of the build-up and the backlash.

3/4/2008 11:02:07 AM by Sharon | Comments [2] |  

In this week's fishwrap we chatted with Mortified creator David Nadelberg about social wallflowers, accidental art, and his new romance-themed anthology. It's 275 pages filled with brutally humiliating tales of love and lust and youth. We cannot be the only people who live for this sort of thing.

Tomorrow night, we beg of you: go see the Mortified Boston stage show at 8 pm at the Paradise Lounge, followed by a book-signing of Mortified: Love is a Battlefield with Nadelberg himself. It's $12. And Freeks & Geeks creator/champion of the unpopular kids in high school Paul Feig hearts the entire venture, so, you know, it's not just us. How awesome is that cover? We love this person, whoever they are. Share the shame, and in the meantime, watch the Mortified Showbox Show's latest web-isode, "Everyone's a Critic." (You may remember Will as the guy you wanted to be best friends with after listening to that This American Life episode, "Parental Guidance Suggested," in which he read letters that he wrote to his Grandma because he didn't have friends, OMG.) Our heart. It breaks. Continually.

2/5/2008 11:13:05 AM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

Okay, we feel badly for calling out Jezebel about the whole bitter thing -- it's not all the time! it's just about certain stuff! and we understand how they feel because excessive shallowness is annoying! -- but anyway, we are kissing their collective bums over this Friday Fine Lines feature that they've been running for the past while. We've been meaning to tell you about it but neglected to because we have a lot of trouble concentrating on Fridays. So each week, Lizzie Skurnick reviews and discusses the YA books beloved to most girls in their youth. It's the-next-to-most-delicious-thing other than actually sitting down and rereading them. Today's feature is about the brilliant Katherine Patterson's Jacob Have I Loved, which we totally forgot after our recent revived obsession with Judy Blume yet is absolutely one of our favorite, favorite, FAVORITE YA's of all time. How amazing is that cover. We can't even talk about it. LOUISE WAS TOTALLY THE PRETTIER SISTER. We really want to stop off at the BPL, hustle up to the kid's section, borrow it, take it home, and cry about it all weekend. Our heart breaks.

2/1/2008 5:11:37 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

Well, hello there! Yep, we're still here. So let's talk shop.

The 39 Clues, a new series that Scholastic is billing as the successor to Harry Potter sounds remarkably dull. Collector cards? Why not just package the books with Pogs. More Paper Cuts contributors are on the way. Editorial Ass is a blog we recently discovered, written by an extremely witty former ed assistant. Why are we so easily seduced by books about crafting, even though we never, ever craft, only tell ourselves we will? We finished the novel, and now we must see the movie. It will not be good enough. Why is it so impossible to give holiday gifts that aren't books? We're giving this away to at least two people. It's not Harold Bloom-approved, duhs, but it's as delicious a read as we've ever had. Meh, all these lists are really exhausting. Should we be reading Tree of Smoke instead of Persuasion right now? Probably. Of course, nobody can stop us. Oh happy day.

12/18/2007 5:14:59 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

11/30/2007 2:44:34 PM by Sharon | Comments [1] |