paper trail

Sep 13, 2010 @ 9:00:00 am

Hilton Als

Tonight, the Rumpus ushers in autumn with a "Summer Shakedown" event. There's a stellar lineup of authors including Nick Flynn (The Ticking is the Bomb), Sara Marcus (Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution), and Hilton Als (Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis), as well as comedians Michael Showalter and Jessi Klein, performers Elissa Bassist and Corrina Bain, and music by Frankie Rose and the Outs.

The new Paris Review is out, and we haven't been so excited about a literary magazine in ages. It's the first issue edited by Lorin Stein, and if it’s any indication, he's taking the magazine in an exciting (and more fiction-friendly) direction. There are stories by Sam Lipsyte and Lydia Davis, both authors whom Stein edited during his tenure at FSG. The interviews—with Mating author Norman Rush and French bad boy Michel Houellebecq—are excellent. And it looks fantastic. Do check it out. In other lit-mag news, Hilton Als's new novella appears in the latest issue of McSweeney's, which has a magic ink cover, along with fiction by Steven Millhauser and Roddy Doyle.

In the 1970s, William S. Burroughs collaborated on a "Word/Image" novel with Malcolm McNeil. Fantagraphics has just announced that it will publish the work, "Ah Pook Is Here," along with McNeil's memoir of working with the junky high priest of the Beats, next year.

With a month to go before the Man Booker prize announces its winner, Andrew Motion, chair of the judges' panel, writes about the hard work of whittling down the list from 140 titles to the shortlist of 6, the criteria used to pick these titles, and their variety: "what characterises our list is the difficulty of fitting it into a neat category. Which feels like a fitting tribute to pay to a form that has always thrived on notions of surprise and unpredictability."