Stephen Elliott and Ross Simonini will be reading on behalf of the Believer with Joe Meno, tonight (June 9) at 7pm at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. More info here.

On Mon, June 1, 2009, BAMcinématek and the Believer present screenings of One P.M., directed by D.A. Pennebaker and Jean-Luc Godard, at BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn. Film issues (containing the related DVD anthology JLG in USA) will be on sale, and curator Jacob Perlin will introduce the films. Showtimes: 4:30, 6:50, and 9:15pm. More info here.

Believer readers are invited to a special advance screening of the new film Away We Go, written by Dave Eggers & Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes, on Friday, May 1, in San Francisco. Click here for more info.

The Believer is proud to have been nominated for a 2009 Utne Independent Press Award, in the category of Arts Coverage.

The Believer is on Twitter! Follow us here!

Will Eno’s superb Thom Pain (based on nothing), a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, is currently playing in its San Francisco premiere at the Cutting Ball Theater, recently extended through May 9. Click here for tickets.

“What do you think about people who see you as a role model, as a pioneering professional female philosopher?” — “I think they’re pretty silly. They have no idea how different things used to be.” Marjorie Grene, 1910-2009.

Just out on Knopf: Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, an excerpt of which ran in our June 2008 issue as “John Cheever on the Rocks”.

On Sunday, Dec. 14, at 7pm, at KGB Bar in New York City, Believer editors Heidi Julavits and Ed Park will read, followed by novelist Deb Olin Unferth. KGB is located at 85 E 4th St, and can be reached at (212) 505-3360. Click here for more details.

The third (and, sadly, final) collection of Nick Hornby’s columns for the Believer, called Shakespeare Wrote for Money, with an introduction by Sarah Vowell, is now available. Click here to buy it.

On Nov. 12, 2008, the Believer will collaborate with the live performance and public radio series Selected Shorts, featuring Broadway and Hollywood actors reading classic and new short fiction.

This evening will feature readings of stories selected and introduced by editors Ed Park and Heidi Julavits. The readers will include Alec Baldwin and playwright Will Eno.

Believer readers can get discounted tickets by using the code SSP253 when ordering tickets online; by phone to the Symphony Space box office at (212) 864-5400; or in person at the theater, located in Manhattan at 2537 Broadway at 95th Street.

New in Online Exclusives: Ben Bush interviews rapper Doseone.

This Saturday, Oct. 11, Joshua Clover (The Totality for Kids), Jessica Fisher (Frail-Craft), Troy Jollimore (Tom Thomson in Purgatory), and Miranda Mellis (The Revisionist) will read in the Believer’s LitQuake crawl at the Latin American Club, 3286 22nd Street, in the Mission district of San Francisco. More info here.

We’ve put up the full text of the David Foster Wallace interview, conducted by Dave Eggers, which ran in our Nov. 2003 issue. “Distract me.”

Remembrances of David Foster Wallace will be appearing over at McSweeney’s this week. All are invited to contribute.

Believer regular Paul Collins appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition on September 6, discussing the spelling reform movements that he wrote about in his “Buzzkill” essay, which ran in our September issue. Listen to the NPR segment here, and read the full-text essay here.

We’re pleased to announce that our September 2008 issue features the debut of a new monthly column by Greil Marcus, “Real Life Rock Top Ten”.

Alas, this issue also marks the final installment of Nick Hornby’s monthly column, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading”. A third collection of his column, called Shakespeare Wrote for Money, will be available in December, and it will feature a ridiculously comprehensive index.

Brandon Stosuy will be reading and discussing “A Blaze In The North American Sky”, his essay from the music issue, on Mon., Aug. 11, at Lit Lounge, 93 2nd Ave, between 5th & 6th St, NYC.

Additionally, there will be performances by REVOCATION (Boston progressive death/thrash), PSYTOXIA (Guttural gore grind groove from Albany), and HOOKER DRAGGER (NY death metal perversion).

Finally, there will be a metal DJ set between bands and afterwards by DJ Shark, and a reading of Dan Nelson’s All Known Metal Bands, just out from McSweeney’s. There’s a $6 admittance fee, to cover the bands.

Congratulations to Douglas Wolk, whose book Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean has won a 2008 Eisner Award in the category Best Comics-Related Book. Wolk’s chapter on Cerebus creator Dave Sim originally appeared in our September 2005 issue.

New in Online Exclusives: Stephen Elliott interviews Matt Bai, acclaimed political writer for the New York Times magazine.

New in Online Exclusives: Alan G. Brake interviews Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home.

Ed Park is on the West Coast this week and will be reading in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and LA. Click here for the dates.

Believer editor Ed Park’s novel Personal Days is out today. For tour dates and purchase information, click here.

At 6 p.m. on Saturday, May 3, in the Tishman Auditorium at the New School in New York City (66 West 12th St), the Believer will be hosting an evening with the PEN World Voices Festival.

Hosted by Todd Barry, the night will include music from John Wesley Harding, a panel discussion, moderated by Morgan Meis, with Scandinavian authors Halfdan Freihow, Christian Jungersen, Jo Nesbø, and Kristín Ómarsdóttir, and a live interactive ViewMaster performance by Vladimir.

The event is free and open to the public. Click here for more info.

The Believer and IFC are co-sponsoring a preview screening of Mister Lonely, the new film by Harmony Korine, this Monday, April 21, at 7:30 p.m. in Los Angeles.

Benjamin Weissman will interview Korine after the screening. A reception will follow.

This event is at the Egyptian Theater, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. Doors are at 6:30 p.m., show at 7:30. Please RSVP via email. (Attendance is on a first-come, first-served basis. RSVPing is required but does not guarantee entry.)

“Remembering is not one single thing — it is more like a hulking, many-tentacled beast, covered with a host of effectors and receptors. Though it can approach from many angles, without any destination in mind, it always ends up in one place.” New in Online Exclusives: David Givens’s “No Shell, Just a Ghost”.

“Among teenage boys whose opportunities for social interaction were otherwise not great, Dungeons & Dragons was like a door opening. Forget for a moment that behind the door there were mostly monsters and darkness. For us, for the people who played, what waited behind that door was a world, and the world belonged to us.” — Paul La Farge, “Destroy All Monsters”, Sep. ’06

RIP Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D, 1938-2008.

New in Online Exclusives, coinciding with the arrival of the 2008 Film Issue: Shana Nys Dambrot interviews Sandy Reynolds-Wasco, acclaimed set decorator for Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Mamet, etc.

Jason Boog’s “Skinning the Americans” (September 2007) is one of ShortEnd magazine’s “40 Film Journalism Must-Reads & Sees of 2007.”

The Believer Book Awards are back! Send in the names of the three best works of fiction published in 2007 by March 1 to this address. You can also fax them to 415.642.5858, or mail them to 849 Valencia St., SF, CA 94110. Please include your mailing address and email address. The results will appear in the May 2008 issue.

Believer editor Ed Park will be reading from his forthcoming novel Personal Days as part of the “What’s So Funny about Brooklyn?” event at the Brooklyn Public Library on Thursday, 7 Feb., at 7pm. Also appearing will be David Rees, Gary Shteyngart, Anthony Winkler, and Amy Sedaris. For more info, click here.

This week’s full-text pieces:

From Nov. ’04: Miles Marshall Lewis in conversation with the late playwright August Wilson. “I always say that any painter that stands before a canvas is Picasso until proven otherwise.”

From Feb. ’05: Jonathan Lethem in conversation with Paul Auster. “There’s only one reader of a novel. That’s, I think, the crucial fact about all this. Only one person. Every time, only one person.”

Editor Vendela Vida will be reading at a fiftieth issue Believer party in Portland, OR on Friday, Jan. 25, at 8pm. For more information, click here.

This week’s full-text pieces:

From Apr. ’06: Brian J. Barr’s interview with Modest Mouse frontman and chef Isaac Brock. Recipes included. “How rad would it be to start a compost restaurant?”

From Sep. ’06: Paul La Farge delves into the continuing appeal of Dungeons & Dragons, and rolls with D&D creator Gary Gygax. “I wonder if the dungeons where most early adventures took place are fantasy versions of the basements of the Midwest?”

This week’s full-text pieces:

From Oct. ’03: Arthur C. Clarke and Lawrence Weschler discuss the intelligence of machines and the future of wonder. “It may well be that only in space, confronted with environments fiercer and more complex than any to be found upon this planet, will intelligence and creativity be able to reach their fullest potential.”

From Feb. ’06: Alec Wilkinson explores the tunnels underneath New York City. “A person might stand in Central Park on a certain piece of grass and reflect that many floors below his shoes is a room with the lights on.”

Believer editor Heidi Julavits will be on tour in January, February, and April, reading from and signing her novel, The Uses of Enchantment. Click here for her tour dates.

Bookstores across the country will be helping us celebrate the publication of issue fifty, with raffles, pizzas, and prizes. Click here to find a Believer party near you.

Also: Sets of thirty — nay, forty — Believer photo postcards by Brian McMullen can now be purchased for $7.00. If you’re the kind of person who writes holiday thank-you notes, you may enjoy writing them on these postcards. Click here to buy ’em.

This week’s full-text pieces:

From Aug. ’06: Joshuah Bearman’s interview with Marjane Satrapi, graphic novelist and author of Persepolis. “Nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.”

From June/July ’05: Aimee Mann in conversation with Patton Oswalt. “We have no choice but to be psychotically upbeat about everything.”

To celebrate issue fifty, all through January we’re going to be full-text-ifying various pieces from the magazine that were previously available online only as excerpts. To start: Nick Hornby’s Aug. ’07 conversation with David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire. “Put down that CSI shit and pay some heed, motherfuckers!”

This is the fiftieth issue of the Believer. It’s been nearly five years. It’s eighty pages. The mellow sky whispers waxen fronds of gore into your sex pond. We’re still excited.

For three nights only, Dec. 13-15, Intersection for the Arts’s resident theater company Campo Santo and Sean San Jose present a new theater piece created from Vendela Vida’s novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. More information is available here.

National Novel Writing Month is just around the corner. The NaNoWriMo challenge: Join 100,000 authors in bashing out the first-draft of a novel by midnight, November 30. Registration is free. Judges are not invited. Prizes are mediocre to nonexistent (save the thrill of producing a remarkably unhorrible manuscript in thirty days). Isn’t it time you wrote that novel? Sign up now at NaNoWriMo.org.

Congratulations to Jenny Price, whose essay, “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA” (published in two parts, in the April and May 2006 issues) was a finalist for the 2007 PEN USA Literary Awards.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean this month by Da Capo Press. The book includes Wolk’s essay on Cerebus that appeared in the September 2005 issue.

Reader Christopher Michel, from Syracuse, NY, writes:

“Thank you so much for posting ‘The Lost Symphony’ on your website. Paul Collins’s essay about Virginius Dabney’s book is almost as amazing as the book itself, and is an excellent introduction to an astounding piece of forgotten literature. I wanted to bring your attention to the fact that the complete text of Don Miff is now available online for download or viewing at this address.”

The McSweeney’s Store is having a giant blowout sale this week to get us through the heinous bankrupt-distributor times we’ve been enduring. We're also auctioning off original artwork from Chris Ware, Marcel Dzama, David Byrne, and Tony Millionaire. More info here and in the Store.

“If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?” — Richard Rorty, 1931-2007.

New in Online Exclusives: A conversation between Ted Leo and WFMU’s Tom Scharpling.

This Saturday, April 28, from 6-7:30pm at the Tishman Auditorium of New York City’s New School for Social Research, another Believer Night-Time event will unfold. Hosted by Eric Bogosian, the evening will include a presentation about money by Miranda July; a brief reading by Bogosian from his forthcoming novel; a screening of a short film entitled Heavy Metal Drummer; writer speed dating overseen by John Hodgman and featuring Niccolò Ammaniti, Uzodinma Iweala, Yasmina Khadra and Isabel Hoving. The Tishman Auditorium is located at 66 West 12th St. For more information, click here.

We are delighted by the news that the Believer is a 2007 National Magazine Award finalist in the categories of Design and Single-Topic Issue (for our 2006 June/July Music Issue).

We’d like to bring to our readers’ attention the publication of Howard Hampton’s book, Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses, from Harvard University Press. Three of the pieces in the book originally appeared in the Believer, including the lead track.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Dean Young’s eighth book of poems, embryoyo.

The April 2007 issue of the Believer will contain an essay by Jonathan Taylor about his visit to the Thomas Bernhard house, near the village of Ohlsdorf in Upper Austria. In the meantime, future readers of this essay are encouraged to go to the KGB Bar in NYC on Sunday, Feb. 18, 2007, at 7pm, for a reading and discussion of Bernhard’s influence. More information is here.

On February 4, Ghita Schwarz spoke with Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge about her essay “A Case of Boredom”, which appears in our February 2007 issue. You can listen to the segment here.

New in the McSwys Store: the Believer Faces Poster.

We don't know why it took us so long to get an RSS feed up on the website. We have no excuse. But it is finally here. Subscribe to it to keep up-to-date with Believer announcements, new issue contents, online exclusives, and the like.

Believer editor Vendela Vida will be on tour in January, February, and March, reading from her new novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Click here for her tour dates.