Joan Didion is from Sacramento, like me, and more than once I’ve had the experience of reading one of her essays that contemplates that city and seeing articulated things I’d always known but could never name. That’s an amazing feeling, to have the character of a place you can feel but not quite grasp crystallized in revelatory prose. (Even if sometimes the revelations are challenging or uncomfortable.) For the country’s 250th anniversary, Esquire put together a list of books that do this for America. Check out our list of The Most American Books below. —Kevin Dupzyk, features director
|
|
|
|
Making appearances: at least three presidents, a handful of Pulitzer prize winners, a white whale, and a very nice pig.
|
In a world where short-form video rockets across the world in seconds, journalism is shifting rapidly away from written reporting to “storytelling” on podcasts, and, chrissakes, robots are doing most of the writing, it can be easy to forget that for most of this nation’s history—all of it, we’d argue—what could really command the American culture’s attention was a thing called a book. The original long-form. Tens of thousands of words ejected from an artist’s mind after a lengthy, often painful process of research, meditation, and incessant scribbling.
So for this 250th year of our great nation, Esquire has compiled a list of our Most American Books. A few ground rules. The first and most obvious: This isn’t a list of best books, favorite books, or books you must read before you die. It’s books that exemplify America. Next: No short stories, no collections of essays, no poetry, no plays, no graphic novels. These are all wonderful art forms, to be sure. But, frankly, we needed a way to narrow our efforts to comb through 25 decades of literature. Third: This isn’t the syllabus for your high school English class. We crossed off the usual suspects, because you’ve already read them and because if your 11th-grade homeroom teacher already told you a book is essential reading for an inchoate American citizen, what do you need us for?
|
|
|
|
Amazon’s Prime Day is best traversed in the smartest way possible: Use it as an excuse to finally score that item you’ve had your eye on already. I, for one, have had a cart filled for the past week with stuff I want to get, waiting until it gets marked down so I can what I can on sale. So what if some of those items are toilet paper? Others are the good stuff—something I’d get anyway—like jeans, a fancy new scent, or a watch. The sale is just icing on top.
Here, we have some favorite brands with every watch style imaginable: a digital bracelet Tissot; a rugged Timex Expedition; a chunky Casio; a sleek Citizen dressy guy. Use this list as your guide to watches that are worth getting anyway—or one pricey enough (re: an under 2K Alpine or a just-under-$600 Movado) where any discount goes a long way. Shop your next chronograph, dress watch, or field watch here.
|
|
|
|
There were many written accounts of shape-shifting beasts from the Dark Ages, and these archaic texts were all writer-director Robert Eggers needed as inspiration for his latest film: Werwulf. The filmmaker behind Nosferatu, The Northman, The Lighthouse, and The VVitch is renowned for his immersive and authentic style, crafting stories that feel less like movies and more like time travel to dark, distant, and uncertain eras.
As part of Esquire’s exclusive first look at Werwulf, featuring star Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a 13th-century man haunted by his bestial metamorphosis, Eggers speaks about what he drew from the various ancient lores for his original story and what he discarded from modern-day pop-culture werewolf tales. He also breaks down the roles played by Lily-Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe and provides the very first details about what to expect when Werwulf debuts this December.
|
|
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment