Greer Mansfield
December 21, 2011
What Can Vaclav Havel Do For You?
And now Vaclav Havel is dead. Absurdist playwright, passionate essayist, beer connoisseur, deep thinker about humankind’s place in the cosmos, non-violent fighter for human freedom and dignity, political prisoner of his country’s totalitarian communist regime, and then the post-Velvet Revolution president of Czechoslovakia (and, after the nation split, president of the Czech Republic). What do [...]
December 16, 2011
Hitchens On Hacks
Christopher Hitchens is dead. His essays were feisty and elegant, well within the great tradition of combative English pamphleteering. He was usually provocative, often dazzling in his historical and literary allusions, and rarely boring. He only became a bore, really, in his final decade. His ironic and playful mind became (at times) monomaniacal, first about [...]
November 16, 2011
Do Novels Cause Old Person Terrorism?
A bunch of decrepit rednecks fantasizing about mass murder is a common enough occurrence in North Georgia (your Wonkette bookman knows this from lifelong experience). What’s different about the alleged plot by this AARP IRA is that they had the misfortune to run into an FBI informant who actually challenged them to put their brain-damaged [...]
October 6, 2011
Author Exposes U.S. Gov’t Cluelessness, Gets Persecuted by U.S. Gov’t
The U.S. State Department has been known to make noise about protecting free speech around the world. Writers and bloggers, the department says, should be allowed to publish their opinions even if they conflict with government dogma. But these freedoms are granted to humanity by the State Department under the strict condition that the people [...]
August 12, 2011
A Wonkette Guide To Political Summer Reading (Ha, Not Really!)
It’s been a while since the last installment of Wonkette World o’ Books, and heavens how the world has changed since that time of economic chaos and meaningless violence here and abroad. Oh, we’re kidding, for there is nothing new under the sun (which is known to feast on human hearts). But as a blind [...]
Angsty rich kid Osama bin Laden could have been just another Saudi playboy, loitering his days away trading oil and chasing Lebanese models. But he just HAD to rebel against his wealthy family and their friends in the Saudi royal family, forever proving that he’s His Own Person or something. And so he embraced the [...]
Looking for a good read while you’re protesting the literal dissolution of your union or local death panel? You could do a lot worse than the new book from free-speech champion and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies and Their Lovers Changed the Course of [...]
April 22, 2011
Book: Charlie Sheen & Matt Lauer Are Liberals Who Say Dumb Things
Anyone who writes or speaks about politics (with very few exceptions) is bound to say something stupid and egregious at some point or another. You’ll definitely say something dumb if you’re one of the ambitious but dull people who actually runs for office here in the United States. The Wonkette Goofiness Machine thrives on this [...]
How does thin-skinned teevee star Donald Trump spend his time when he’s not disfiguring skylines and signing prenups? As he recently told the world, he “has written many bestsellers,” so presumably he spends a fair amount of time engaged in “word usage.” We’ve conducted a literary investigation to determine what this word usage is like. [...]
Bill Bennett — or as he calls himself on his book jackets, “William J. Bennett”– has shown over the course of his long career that he’s mainly interested in three things: 1) holding back the tide of drug dealers eager to dine on your children; 2) reducing world literature to “And the moral of the [...]
It would be a shame if the Brit-Frog-Yank bombs raining down on Libya right now destroyed any libraries or bookstores. Not because books are valuable or important (they aren’t; the Internet proves that, scientifically) but because “short story” collections written by one of humankind’s more outlandish dictators are curiosities worth preserving (unlike “books” in general). [...]
