A San Francisco literary agent says she plans to be more careful about her use of social media—and especially about how much she announces her location—after she was violently attacked last week by an author whose manuscript she rejected.
n+1 editor Marco Roth talks to the Observer about his forthcoming memoir, and about how an investigation into his father’s death led him back through the canon of classic novels that his father made him read as a teenager.
For the next 135 days, a star-studded cast that includes Tilda Swinton, Will Self, and David Cameron will be reading chapters of Moby Dick and posting the recordings online as part of the Moby Dick Big Read. Artists Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley are also contributing to the project.
Speaking of audiobooks, readers planning very, very long road trips might consider taking the new 120-disc set of Remembrance of Things Past along with them. The 153-hour reading of Proust’s classic replaces the only previously existing version: an abridged, 36-disc set.
A Columbia graduate student has unearthed a lost novel by Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay titled Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem. Jean-Christophe Cloutier discovered the novel while working in a rare book archive, and its authenticity was verified by his dissertation advisor (and Bookforum contributor) Brent Hayes Edwards. The find is being described as a “major discovery” and “scholarly gold” by Harlem Renaissance authorities, and Edwards told the New York Times that it will likely be recognized “as the key political novel of the black intellectual life in New York in the late 1930s.”
“Recently, there’s been pressure to be more aggressive on fact-checking and truth-squading,” says New York Times’s political editor Richard Stevenson. “It’s one of the most positive trends in journalism that I can remember.” Relatedly, if you haven’t read Michael Lewis’s 13,000-word profile of President Obama in the latest Vanity Fair, we recommend it.
The Nervous Breakdown conducts a six question sex interview with Junot Diaz.
