(Necrophiliac) Californication

John Niven writes for Esquire about life in screenwriting and Hollywood.

Books I've actually finished lately: 97

Did you hear about the Polish actress who came to Hollywood? She slept with a writer.

- Rob Long

On Teju Cole

Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”

- James Wood, The New Yorker

Totally retarded comment by Henry Mancini

Bookwise, I favor biographies of musicians and composers from Bach to the present.

- Henry Mancini, Did They Mention the Music?