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.

New in Online Exclusives: “’Till the Day That I Drop”, Dan Kois’s apologia of sorts for the late Robert Altman’s Popeye.

New in Online Exclusives: An interview with Dana Spiotta.

New in Online Exclusives: “The Last Antiwar Poem”, an essay by Rolf Potts.

Believer regular Paul Collins was featured on NPR’s October 28 Weekend Edition, where he spoke about 1820s crime reporter James Curtis and the William Corder murder trial, the subjects of his essay “The Molecatcher’s Daughter” from our November issue. Listen to the NPR segment here, and read the full-text essay here.

We have posted Chris Baty’s rules for the game “Overrated” from the September Games Issue, along with a PDF of 72 sample “Overrated” game-play cards illustrated by Andy Warner.

Correction:The hidden sixteenth track on the cd included in this year’s music issue is (Imprismed) by Gang Gang Dance. We hid this information so carefully in the music issue that it did not appear there at all. You should already own their excellent new album, entitled God’s Money.

New in Online Exclusives: An interview with musician Jamie Lidell.

On July 5, 2006, at 6:30pm, the Believer will host an evening of infotainment at the The Backyard Garden, Red Hook, Brooklyn.

• Sarah Manguso and Deb Olin Unferth will read several of their short short stories;
  
• Devin McKinney will read something musical/uncanny;
  
• Elisabeth Vincentelli will describe the pleasures of the Eurovision Dance Contest;
  
• Brandon Stosuy will read from his “Downtown” anthology;
  
• and Gretta Cohn (cellist, ex-Cursive) will perform some original music.

Directions: The venue is at Van Brunt St. and Hamilton Ave. Take the F train to Carroll Street, cross pedestrian bridge to Red Hook, follow Summit Street to Hamilton Ave.

On June 3, Paul Collins appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition to discuss “A Brief History of Rock Music”, which appears in the June/July issue. Listen to the segment here.

On Tuesday, May 9th, from 6:00 - 7:30 pm, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the New York Public Library present Program II of “Periodically Speaking: Literary Magazine Editors Introducing Emerging Writers.” The Believer will be represented in the program with editor Heidi Julavits introducing Ginger Strand.

The event will be held at the DeWitt Wallace Periodicals Room in the New York Public Library Humanities and Social Sciences Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd St. Please use Fifth Avenue entrance; admittance is free. More information here.

New in Online Exclusives: A conversation between authors T Cooper and Sigrid Nunez.

We thought our readers would be interested to know that Intersection’s and Campo Santo’s production of “Haze” — a new performance work created from the writings of Believer editor Vendela Vida, Dave Eggers, Junot Diaz, and Denis Johnson — opens tonight (13 April) at the Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St. in San Francisco. It will run Thursdays through Saturdays until 29 April.

Also, there will be a special benefit performance of “Haze” this Sunday, 16 April, and Vendela and Junot will read from their new works at a post-show reception.

More info about the performances can be found here. You can make reservations here or by calling (415) 626-3311.

Amy Sedaris remains on sabbatical from her column-writing duties, but she’s just announced that Jerri Blank has agreed to take over Sedaratives for the summer. With this in mind, we need letters that a woman of Jerri’s background might feasibly be able to answer. Send questions about the prom, STDs, incest, personal hygiene, and related matters to this address.

At 7:00 p.m., on Saturday, 29 April, the 2006 PEN World Voices Festival will present “A Believer Nighttime Event” featuring Salman Rushdie, Etgar Keret, Dubravka Ugresic, Rodrigo Fresán, Yiyun Li, and Helen Oyeyemi. Matthew Ritchie will talk with Ben Marcus, and there will be a panel discussion entitled “The Secret Life of Secrets.” The evening will be moderated by John Hodgman. Surprise guests are likely.

Tickets are free: call (212) 229-5600. Co-sponsored by the New School Graduate Writing Program. More info here.

Advanced copies of the fourth title from Believer Books, Voyage Along the Horizon, by Javier Marías, are available online. It’s Marías’s second novel, never before available in English. It’s rollicking and completely riveting. More information is available at books.believermag.com.

For the second year running, the Believer is a finalist for the National Magazine Award in General Excellence!

Koko Taylor, the reigning queen of the blues, will be writing an upcoming installment of Sedaratives, Amy Sedaris’s monthly advice column in the Believer. Please email Koko Taylor‒specific questions to this address immediately.

The March issue’s drawings of gorillas wrapped in vines are by Pennsylvania artist Keith Andrew Shore. More work can be seen at KASprojects.com.

Two issues of the Believer (October 04 and Dec 04/Jan 05) are included in the AIGA Design Archives, “a record of annual juried selections of design excellence and the work of designers honored by AIGA.” More information can be found here.

The first issue of Wholphin, the DVD quarterly published by McSweeney’s, was glued to the first page of the Dec/Jan issue of the Believer. It should be noted that Wholphin will not be packaged with further issues of this magazine. To obtain subsequent issues of Wholphin, and to subscribe, please visit wholphindvd.com.