#fictional-characters

#fictional-characters

Samantha Irby knows how to write in many mediums.The No. 1 New York Times best-selling author has published several books of personal essays.She's written for TV shows like Shrill and And Just Like That ..., the Sex and the City reboot, and about what it felt like to almost turn one of her books of essays into a TV show itself.

Female novelists seem to be getting a bit of a bashing these days.Some literature courses offer trigger warnings for anyone frightened by the toxicity of Jane Eyre or Northanger Abbey.Tom Rachman's The Imposters doesn't let them off too lightly either.His first novel, The Imperfectionists, focused on journalists.

One need not be queer to be a queer icon.Take Cher "Do You Believe in (Heterosexual) Love After (Heterosexual) Love" Sarkisian.Or Madonna "Justify My (Straight) Love" Ciccone.In a way, the mantle of "queer icon" is like a lifetime achievement award for the straights.And we can get touchy when people are too hasty in deeming someone - or, cringe, themselves - a queer icon.

An artist who bent a full-sized roller coaster into the skeletal form of a woolly mammoth is among four nominees who have been shortlisted for this year's Turner Prize.Oxford-born Jesse Darling's exhibitions No Medals, No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford and Enclosures at Camden Art Centre were praised for using a series of consumer goods, construction materials, fictional characters and mythical symbols to evoke the vulnerability of the human body.

You know what the best nights really need?It's not thumping music and frenetic energy.It's not massive venues full of people jostling each other and spilling drinks as they exclaim 'BEST NIGHT OF MY LIFE.' No, we're getting too old for that.The best nights are spent in cosy surroundings, with delicious drinks, and touches of luxury.

Russell Banks' 1985 breakout novel, Continental Drift, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.He's pictured above in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in December 2007.Thony Belizaire/AFP via Getty Images American novelist and activist Russell Banks died on Sunday of cancer at the age of 82.Banks built an A-list literary career writing about working-class families and immigrants who struggle on the margins of American life.

The Three of Us, a tightly constructed debut novel written during lockdown by British Nigerian Ore Agbaje-Williams, a book editor in the U.K., had me feeling trapped and looking for escape routes.Billed as a mashup of domestic noir and comedy of manners, Agbaje-Williams' novel closely tracks the insidious dynamic between three wealthy, well-educated young Brits of Nigerian descent a married couple and the wife's devilishly manipulative best friend over the course of a single wine-drenched day.

With apologies to Dr. Emmett Brown, you don't need a flux capacitor to build a time machine.All you need to do is make a film.Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, a new biographical documentary from Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), zips through the Back to the Future actor's career with humor and style; it gives the impression that its subject is willing to answer any question.

This month's mix of titles leaving Netflix in the United States include two coming-of-age comedy dramas, a twisty thriller throwback, a wrenching Holocaust documentary and two uproarious comedies (one of them smuggled into an animated family film).Give them a stream before they're gone.(Dates reflect the last day a title is available.)

By Jan Wahl-
Just when I thought I couldn't have more respect for Lady Gaga, she made an artistic choice at the Oscars that blew me away.She at first appeared in the audience, dressed and made up beautifully, as only Gaga can.Less than a half hour later, she appeared onstage, completely sans makeup, in jeans and a t-shirt.

Popular baby names are tempting, aren't they?At the height of their popularity, the names of celebrities, fictional characters, and cultural icons seem to have an outsize beauty, power, and influence.Surely Game of Thrones couldn't do anything to ruin the great name of Daenerys, right?For parents interested in bucking baby-naming trends, baby names plucked from popular culture can have a one-of-a-kind ring to them... unless thousands of other soon-to-be-parents are thinking along the same lines.

Works by Andy Warhol are to be shown in Dublin as part of Ireland's largest display of pop art.
he Pop Art Pioneers exhibition at Gormleys will showcase 2 million euro worth of works by Warhol and fellow US artists Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and Robert Indiana.It will feature Warhol's silkscreen portraits, Lichtenstein's The Den, Haring's graphic designs and Indiana's LOVE artworks.

Microsoft's Bing AI is hiding a "Celebrity" mode that can impersonate notable public figures in its answers, BleepingComputer reports, an early sign that the company could be looking to expand on the AI's uncanny ability to entertain - rather than inform - users.A simple request to turn on "Celebrity mode" prompts Bing Chat to imitate a household name of your choosing.

Every year since 2016, music fans and artists all over the world anticipate the release of Spotify Wrapped, the streaming platform's annual data-tracking-turned-cool breakdown of music stats and rankings.Since the 2022 drop of Spotify Wrapped, your social media has likely flooded by friends sharing their top songs, artists, genres, and other streaming details for the year (with data collection actually ending a bit early on Oct. 31).