At This Recording, Tyler Coates reviews Keith Gessen’s All The Sad Young Literary Men, a book that I’m admittedly curious about, but absolutely refuse to read in hardcover unless someone gives me a copy. It is one of those new fangled novels that wants to tell people in their late 20s and early 30s who live in New York and have creative aspirations and complicated desires what it feels like to be a person in their late 20s and early 30s who lives in New York and has creative aspirations and complicated desires. It is sort of related to movies, by several degrees: Keith Gessen co-founded the literary journal N+1, the latest issue of which I read on the way back from Cannes; the co-founder of N+1, Benjamin Kunkel, wrote the novel Indecision, which Andrew Bujalski is allegedly adapting for Scott Rudin, to some chagrin from those of us who like Bujalski but hate that novel.

Anyway. Towards the end of his (largely negative) review, Coates brings up a blog post written by Gessen’s former girlfriend, Emily Gould. If you live in the world New York on the internet, you’ll know that Emily Gould used to write for Gawker and was recently eviscerated by that site for writing an extremely long cover story for the New York Times Magazine about dating another person who used to write for that site. Less press was given over to an earlier evisceration of Emily by Gawker, in which publisher Nick Denton basically accused his former employee of sleeping her way to the top (of what? The Gawker hate list?) by sleeping with Gessen. I thought that Denton’s post was really, really gross. I thought the NYT Mag piece was just unnecessary––although I applaud anyone who can make five figures off of blogging.

Okay, but seriously: this is a blog post about movies. Here it comes: …Read more