Dept. of Self-Promotion: New Cult Canon in Kansas City, Nathan Rabin memoir coming soon
Sometimes your humble A.V. Club correspondents make their way out into the wider world and hope that a few of you will follow along. With that in mind, here are a couple of announcements:
This Wednesday, May 6th at 6:30 p.m., I’ll be appearing at the Kansas City Public Library’s Central Library to give a one-time-only presentation on my weekly column The New Cult Canon. To my utter astonishment and delight, the Library has decided to use the New Cult Canon as the theme for its upcoming “Off The Wall” summer outdoor film series, and the event comes in advance of a slate that includes They Live, Near Dark, Fight Club, Donnie Darko, and Battle Royale. I’ll be talking about the project, showing a few clips, and doing a Q&A afterwards, so if you live in the area and want to watch a gawky, nervous fellow talk about movies, here’s your chance. You can RSVP by calling 806-701-3407. You can also read a long-ish email interview I did for this week’s Pitch here.
In other exciting news, Nathan Rabin’s memoir The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop Culture (Scribner) comes out in just over two months and now would be a good time to preorder, if only to avoid the Harry Potter-like frenzy when it’s released on July 7th. It may surprise you to learn that Nathan has an extremely colorful past—he describes it as “Dickensian,” and no less a figure than Roger Ebert thinks the book would make a great Terry Zwigoff film—and the book looks back at his life through the prism of pop culture. Nathan considers his memoir “an opportunity to crassly exploit a lifetime’s worth of psychological pain for monetary gain”; we consider it darkly funny and essential reading.