Novelist Patrick Somerville recounts how a critic's misreading got his fourth book panned in the New York Times, and how an email correspondence between one of the novel's characters and a Times editor resulted in a correction. Meanwhile, Publisher's Weekly looks into how much a NYT Book Review write-up really matters in terms of sales.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's brother has revealed that the Colombian writer's career is effectively over due to dementia, The Guardian reported this weekend. Garcia Marquez, now 85 and the author of five novels and dozens of essay and story collections, has been fighting a protracted battle against lymphatic cancer.
The Los Angeles Review of Books has published decades-old correspondence between William Gaddis and his editor Robert Gottlieb from the time when Gaddis was writing J R.
As if authoring a six-part Lyndon B. Johnson biography wasn't time-consuming enough, Robert Caro is also at work on another project. In addition to the next installment of the LBJ bio, Caro says that he's currently writing an account of how he started writing the biography and the book that came before it, The Power Broker, a biography of New York City urban planner Robert Moses.
A South Carolina woman has been granted a reduced sentence for drunk driving on the condition that she read the Old Testament's Book of Job and write a book report on it.
It was revealed last week that Hemingway wrote forty-seven endings to A Farewell to Arms, prompting Slate to satirically claim that Fitzgerald one-upped him by writing forty-eight endings to The Great Gatsby, including the "nude beach ending" and "The College Lit Mag Ending." Our favorite is No. 7, "The Freudian Ending": "When you really thought about it, Gatsby looked a lot like my mother, and so did Jordan."
