Not expecting much, I watched Small Crimes while grading papers this weekend thought it was surprisingly good. I liked how it uses the convention that we're automatically on the protagonist's side against us. We start out with the protag's POV—that everyone's just against poor Joe Denton—and gradually realize that,…

Agreed on Martyrs. It's an unpleasant movie, but if you aren't able to pick up on that from the opening scene, you're not watching very carefully.

Yeah, "easily"!

For anyone interested, the New Yorker website ran a very funny excerpt of this book last month. It concerns this one time Norm may or may not have given a standup show in a hospital for the criminally insane.

I don't know if you're snarking or not, but I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone better than Dunham at writing about Americans her (our) age. I just caught up on the past few seasons of Girls, and I still think it's a pretty great show. OK? (I'm happy to hear counteroffers, of course.)

Where I come from, they're both grue.

Sunshine is a great, great movie with the odd distinction that any possible description of it sounds pretty, pretty terrible.

Sein und Zeit und Theodor und Adalheidis

Oh, that Being and Time.

I might do Zero K as well. I have a copy of Underworld that might finally get read, too.

I've looked into this, and I think Ellis was pretty deliberate in his effects. Take a look at this interview quote:

Scare-edit is scary, but not really representative of what he said.

I didn't find The Girl Next Door physically shocking so much as I just found it really depressing and really sad. There's no movie adaptation I have less desire to watch. (Have you watched it?)

"I'd argue the idea of it is more interesting than the actual item itself": I read the first half of The Iron Dream a few years ago, and concluded as much about that book as well. There's only so much you can do with a brilliantly executed meta-novel whose conceit is that Adolf Hitler would be a terrible (albeit…

I mean, there's a reason Being There and The Painted Bird are more famous. Either one of those is probably a better starter book. Frankly, they're both probably better books, full stop. On the other hand, if you've read any of the gossip about those, there are people who allege that Kosinski faked Holocaust trauma for …

American Psycho has the largest distance between what I thought of the book while I was reading it and what I thought of the book afterward of any book I've ever read. It's a tedious, grueling, annoying book. By design. But it's astonishingly effective.

It's sort of bizarre that most people now know Jerzy Kosinski for Being There, since most of his work is much closer to the extremity of The Painted Bird. Kosinski's certainly a "problematic" writer, but I'd also put Blind Date on any list of books worth reading.

OK, fine, I'll ask you to tell the police story. (I've read about Lord Horror on the Internet, but I've never come across a copy.)

Yeah, I unironically dig pretty much everything Klosterman's written. I'm stoked to read the new book he has coming out this summer.

I was sort of put off by the intro due to the throwaway riff where Eggers writes about how he's just a guy like me who gets drunk and has unprotected sex sometimes and falls asleep in the midst of said drunken intercourse sometimes—put off, as I said, because when I first read that introduction, this was not really a…