The University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center, which in the past few years has acquired the papers of David Foster Wallace and Denis Johnson, has now bought the papers of J.M. Coetzee, who earned his Ph.D. from UT-Austin in 1969. The Ransom Center will house more than 160 cabinets and boxes of the Nobel Prize winner’s items, including “family photographs, business correspondence, recordings of interviews, notebooks, and early manuscripts for his novels and his autobiography.”
Is it journalism? Is it fiction? Does it matter? Jonathan Franzen claims that David Foster Wallace fabricated some—and perhaps most—of his nonfiction.
Margaret Atwood is no stranger to postapocalyptic scenarios and ecological disaster. So it’s not that surprising that a special, autographed edition of her latest book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, will be printed on a material made primarily out of straw—“without any harmful impact on forests and their fragile ecosystems.”
The “Cavalcade of Literary Jerks: Part 1.” Who will be number one?
Independence Day author Richard Ford is joining the faculty of Columbia’s MFA program in writing.
Hat tip to the Observer’s Emily Witt: In their profile of 97-year-old stand-up comedian Irwin Corey, the New York Times failed to mentioned one of the comic’s better stunts—accepting the 1973 National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow as Thomas Pynchon.
The people who bring you the National Book Award have announced the latest batch of “5 Under 35” authors.
