paper trail

May 12, 2011 @ 4:00:00 am

Susan Sontag

At NYRB, Tim Parks has written an insightful and entertaining blog post about why Swiss author Peter Stamm is interesting to people outside his native country, and why Jonathan Franzen is not. “For the American reader there is the pleasure of recognizing the interiors Franzen so meticulously describes. Not so for the Italian, or German, or Frenchman, who simply struggles through lists of alien bric-a-brac.”

Conde Nast and Hearst have both made deals with Apple to sell magazine subscriptions in the iTunes store. But “why isn’t Time Inc. on board yet?

Sorry for participating in "human database" behavior, but note to the New York Observer: It’s Thomas Bernhard, not “Bernhardt”...

The New York Public Library’s main research branch is about to celebrate its one-hundredth birthday, so they’re putting together an exhibition featuring everything wonderful and weird from their vast holdings, with items such as a copy of the Guttenberg bible, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, and a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair (among many other things) on display. Flavorwire was so inspired by this last bit of ephemera that they’ve cobbled together an online gallery of all the literary hair the NYPL has in various archival collections, with locks from the likes of Walt Whitman, Charlotte Bronte, and others.

FSG has announced its early-2012 list, which will include new novels by Edward St. Aubyn (At Last), Peter Cameron (Coral Glynn), Amelia Gray (Threats) and Sarah Manguso (The Guardians); a memoir by Zakes Mda (Sometimes There Is a Void); and (in April) the second volume of Susan Sontag’s Journals.