Tom Carson: Pam-American
Poor young Pamela Buchanan is more a prop than a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel The Great Gatsby, trotted out by her parents like a particularly rare Tiffany lamp or a yellow Rolls-Royce. She serves as a stark reminder of the stakes of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s infidelities, at least as seen through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway.... read more
Paste mPlayer Issue #3
This week's issue features one of our favorite bands, My Morning Jacket. Paste editor-at-large Jay Sweet has stalked their progress so closely these last seven years that we’re thankful Jim James hasn’t tried to get a restraining order. In a 4,500-word story that spans 13 encounters in five cities, Sweet was the fly on the MMJ wall as the band worked its way up through the ranks. read more
Our Favorite Posters from the Indie Rock Poster Book
“I see where the inspiration came from,” someone might say squinting at a smudge of brown paint on a canvas in a brightly-lit gallery. But it’s often difficult to see where an artist is coming from when the only explanation is a neatly printed card with a singular word or phrase accompanied by a high-price tag.... read more
2010 Person of the Year in Nonfiction: Mark Twain
Since the quintessential American author was not himself available for interview, we decided to do the next best thing and talk to Hal Holbrook, the man who's spent as much time as anyone getting inside the author's head. read more
2010 Person of the Year in Fiction: Jonathan Franzen
Franzen has crafted an eminently accessible, utterly populist work of fiction in which the reading public recognizes itself. read more
Short Story: Vladimir Volkoff's "The Ways of the Lord"
In September of 2005, Russo-French novelist Vladimir Volkoff died in his sleep in Bourdeilles in southwestern France. Born in 1932 in Paris to White Russians who had fled Communism, Volkoff was passionately devoted to a heroic ideal that demanded selfless service and aristocratic honor. His reputation as a writer rested primarily upon the espionage fiction that propelled him into the French media in the early 1980s (The Turnaround, 1979; The Set-Up, 1982; and his magisterial tetralogy, The Moods of the Sea, 1980). But he was also a man of widely diverse talents and interests: an intelligence officer in the French... read more
Book Excerpt: Ten Photos from Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae
The book, which includes photos of Marley, Peter Tosh and George Harrison, also has a foreword written by Cameron Crowe... read more
Best of What's Next: Author Julie Orringer
HOMETOWN: Brooklyn, N.Y. BOOK: The Invisible Bridge FOR FANS OF: Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, The Believer... read more
Best of What's Next: Author Holly Goddard Jones
HOMETOWN: Russellville, Ky. BOOK: Girl Trouble FOR FANS OF: Harper Lee, Heidi Julavits, Claire Messud In Holly Goddard Jones’ short-story collection Girl Trouble, marriages crumble, probable murderers walk free and people toy with and discard each other’s feelings like trinkets from a cereal box. In artful but unpretentious prose, the 30-year-old author explores the simultaneous depths and limitations of being human, showing the many sides of what usually appear to be black-and-white issues.... read more
Best of What's Next: Poetry Revival Comes Alive
HOMETOWNS: Long Beach, Calif.; Portland; Seattle BOOKS: Over the Anvil We Stretch (Anis Mojgani), Live for a Living (Buddy Wakefield), Scandalabra (Derrick Brown) FOR FANS OF: A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Saul Williams... read more
Book Excerpt: Nine Photos From People You'd Like to Know
I love taking pictures. Maybe you can see that in the faces of the people I've captured... read more
Our Favorite Better Book Titles
Sometimes, you need to judge a book by its cover. After all, you’ve got stuff to do, and if it can’t be summarized in 140 characters, it’s probably not worth a read anyway, right? Or something?... read more
Book Excerpt: A Scissor Sister Writes a Comic About CBGB
Ana Matronic is the author of CBGB: The Comic Book... read more
Mr. Unpopular: Gary Shteyngart
In his new novel, Gary Shteyngart takes on the big themes--war, tyranny and talking otters... read more
Book Excerpt: Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America
This story is a part of our Mad Men Takeover. Season four of the series premieres on AMC this Sunday, July 25. — Below, an excerpt from Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s new Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America. Here, the author sets up the excerpt… Beyond Mad Men’s top-notch writing, complex characters, hypnotic design (really, the fusion of all these elements is the highest caliber of art, and it’s so titillating to witness a renaissance in such an unlikely medium, isn’t it?), there’s an all-engrossing mood that permeates the show. That mixture of anxiety, instability, and tectonic cultural shifts that... read more
Baffled Once More: Thomas Frank Resurrects Journal of Pop and Politics
I meet Thomas Frank at a chain coffee shop in the Washington, D.C. suburbs... read more
2 Faust 2 Furious: Script Excerpts From Michael Bay's $600 Million Adaptation of Dr. Faustus
What's the situation? It's bad. Real bad... read more
Elif Batuman: To Russia, With Love
"To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny," Elif Batuman says... read more
The Master's Sputum: Unfinished Nabokov Novel Now Open to Examination
In 1962, prodded by an interviewer to share a glimpse of a first draft, novelist Vladimir Nabokov replied, “Only ambitious non-entities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It is like passing around samples of one’s sputum.” Now, more than 30 years after his death, we have an opportunity—against Nabokov’s expressed wishes—to examine such a sample.... read more
Catching Up With... Augusten Burroughs
Augusten Burroughs overshares. For almost a decade, the ubiquitous author has plundered his personal life to spit out three memoirs and three collections of personal stories, in addition to a novel. But he says he's not doing it for the money. "I love preservation," he tells Paste. "Writing is the preservation of a memory." Burroughs' latest short story collection is You Better Not Cry, a wry, quick-witted handful of essays that revolve around Christmas. Skipping over the peace-and-goodwill part of the holidays, Burroughs paints the Yuletide season as a catalyst for dysfunction to reach its peak. And he would know. The... read more
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