What was life like for successful writers such as Jennifer Egan, Ted Conover, Siri Hustvedt, and Sam Lipsyte before they made it? The blog Days of Yore conducts interviews with first-rate authors about their up-and-coming days.
Tonight, the Fales Library at NYU is hosting its annual Lecture in English and American Literature, presenting Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon on “The Missives of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.”
On Thursday, April 28, Publication Studio—a self-described “experiment in sustainable publication”—will be introducing its 2011 releases to New York City at a fashion show at Heather’s Bar, with authors walking down a makeshift runway in the East Village tavern. A dramatic entrance is appropriate for this forward-thinking print-on-demand press. Run by novelist and brainy bookmaker Matthew Stadler, it is publishing new books by poet Christine Shan Shan Hou (Accumulations), and artist Matt Keegan (A History of New York), both of whom will be at the event. Other titles include a modern classic by Lisa Robertson, and a new title by Dodie Bellamy, in which she meditates on a messy affair with a Buddhist.
The Daily Mail reports that the last typewriter factory in the world, a Godrej and Boyce plant in Mumbai, India, has closed.
Colson Whitehead’s advice to authors who claim they get too distracted by the Internet to finish writing their Great Novel: “The old masters didn't even have freaking penicillin. I think Nietzsche would have endured non-BCC'd e-mail dispatches in exchange for pills to de-spongify his syphilitic brain, and we can all agree Virginia Woolf could've used a scrip for serotonin reuptake inhibitors. I digress. The Internet is not to blame for your unfinished novel: you are.”
