Bookforum contributor Gary Indiana has organized a reading of the Marquise de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, which will take place on Saturday at 2:30 at Participant Gallery. The event will be hosted by novelist Patrick McGrath and will feature writers Lynne Tillman, Max Blagg, Dale Peck, Laurie Weeks, Rhonda Lieberman, Glenn O’Brien, and Richard Hell. Also at the gallery is Indiana’s latest exhibition of photographs and video work, Gristle Springs.
There are American novelists and there are female American novelists—at least according to the gendered logic of Wikipedia. There are 3,837 novelists in the “American Novelist” category, and as Amanda Filipacchi pointed out in the New York Times recently, somebody has begun the process of moving all the women in that category into the “Female American Novelist” subcategory. They’ve gotten as far as the As and Bs, but given the internet outcry, here’s hoping it doesn’t go much further.
In the most recent issue of the Baffler, Bookforum columnist Heather Havrilesky does a late-capitalist reading of Fifty Shades of Gray.
In the wake of the arrest of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Gawker digs deep into the disturbing rise of websites championing his innocence (many created by teenagers girls who have dubbed him “the world’s hottest terrorist”) and what the site describes as the “collision of conspiracy and fandom” on the Internet.
A week in the reading and cultural life of a professional Slavicist.
New York Magazine rounds up the best (i.e. worst) lines from Brian Stelter’s Top of the Morning, a book about the “nefarious network morning show wars” that’s already been panned by The New York Times. (Which is also Stelter’s employer). Here’s our favorite clunker: “Curry's on-air comebacks to Lauer during her first month as cohost were just plain weird — the conversational Hacky Sack often fell thudding to the rug or, figuratively speaking, wound up in the saucepan put out for Al Roker's cooking segment.”
