10-songs-about-writing.jpg

Songwriters spend a great deal of time and energy composing songs about love and loss and regret and d-i-v-o-r-c-e and what prompted Billy Joe McAllister to jump off the Tallahatchee Bridge. All well and good. But how many songs are devoted to writing? Professions generally don't serve as the subject of music. ("Convoy" (trucking), "Casey Jones" (locomotive operation), and "Good Lovin'" (internal medicine) are the exceptions that prove the rule.) Still, I came up with more titles than I imagined I would.

on-the-road-sucks.jpg

Your Favorite Book Sucks is an ongoing column, written by different people, that takes a classic or popular book and argues why it isn't really all that great. Confrontational, to be sure, but it's all in good fun, so please play nice.

Damn dirty self-indulgent over-rated hippie tripe.

-High School Josh on Jack Kerouac's travelogue cum beat bible, On The Road.

staff-picks-friends.jpg

We've already given you our staff picks for the Best Books of 2012, as well as a supplemental Genre Edition for the geeks, but who the hell cares what a bunch of nobodies have to say when some real, live authors are willing to tell us what to read?

what-makes-a-southern.jpg

This week brought the release of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, a revenge epic about a freed slave turned bounty hunter who dares to vanquish mountains, the law, and death itself to rescue his beloved Broomhilda. Tarantino has referred to the film as a "southern" rather than the more traditional western, and the marketing department for the film released the above graphic to delineate the relatively uncommon film category.

must-read-twilight2.jpg

Ready your pitchforks: I'm about to make an unironic defense of the Twilight series, and even argue that you---or any other intelligent writer---should read it. Here are eight reasons you should spend time with these famously terrible books.