Yesterday, five major magazine publishers launched a “digital newsstand” called Next Issue Media. Hearst, Conde Nast, Time Inc., Meredith, and News Corp. have joined forces to offer a service for Tablet readers, who, for a flat monthly fee of $9.99 or $14.99, can have unlimited access to all five publishers’ titles. Poynter calls it “a Netflix for magazines...”
Malcolm Gladwell, Zadie Smith, and...Ben Stiller? Photos from Tuesday’s Paris Review revel.
Gunter Grass has provoked international anger by publishing a poem in Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung in which he criticizes Israel’s nuclear capacity and Western hypocrisy over what he calls Israel’s “claim to the right of a first strike” against Iran. Grass, now 84, is a Nobel Prize winner, and politically “left-leaning.” But he has also been at the center of controversy before, admitting, in his 2006 autobiography, that he was an early member of the Nazi paramilitary organization Waffen-SS.
In a video at the Guardian, Ian McEwan recalls the time he helped his son write a school paper about one of his novels. But his knowledge of his own work didn’t amount to much: The paper received a mediocre grade.
After nine years at the helm of the Virginia Quarterly Review, editor Ted Genoways is stepping down to work on his own writing, the University of Virginia announced in a press release on Wednesday. During his tenure, Genoways was credited (at least by UVA) with elevating VQR from an “obscure college literary magazine to one that could compete with the likes of National Geographic and the New Yorker.” But his leadership at the magazine was questioned in 2010 when former managing editor Kevin Morrissey killed himself after weeks of tension with Genoways. Genoways will be temporarily replaced by deputy editor Donovan Webster, and a national search for his replacement will begin in July.
The Blown Covers asks: What might a New Yorker cover about the Trayvon Martin shooting look like?
How does a seven-hundred-page, self-published, totally obscure debut novel get picked up by a reputable publisher? The University of Chicago Press’s Levi Stahl explains how he found Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity, and why he wants to bring it to a broader audience.
At the Awl, Dave Bry considers a revealing line from Susan Sontag’s recently published second volume of journals: “Most of the interesting art of our time is boring.”
