Afternoon Bites: Putney Swope, Jennifer Egan’s New Story, Matt Fraction Loves the Mountain Goats, and More

The Criterion Collection has released a box set of the films of Robert Downey Sr., including the 1969 classic (and Louis C.K. favorite) Putney Swope. That price is a steal. Speaking of steals: the work of women artists from the post-war era is remarkably cheaper than that of their male counterparts. If we can call $10.7 million cheap, that is. Starting tonight, the New Yorker’s fiction department (@NYerFiction) will be tweeting Jennifer Egan’s new story, which apparently contains only 140-character-or-less […]

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Indexing: Blake Butler in New York, John Barth, Tina Fey, and More!

above: Julian Schnabel, “Dennis Hopper” (1991). Tobias Carroll It’s been a week of surreal literature around these parts. It began with Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, which — although nonfiction — knits together myths, echoed stories, cryptozoology, the vagueness of borders, and the limitations of memory into a travelogue that (I daresay) echoes Werner Herzog’s notion of “ecstatic truth.”  After that came both volumes of Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels, for a review to appear on Word Riot. (Mr. Diamond spoke […]

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