Cormac McCarthy is such a fan of Lawrence Krauss’s biography of scientist Richard Feynman that, without being asked, he offered to edit the paperback edition of Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science. But the offer came with some copy-editing stipulations. “To start with,” Krauss says, “he made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.”
Laura Miller and Maud Newton have teamed up on a new blog, The Chimerist, about “two iPad lovers at the intersection of art, stories, and technology.”
Variety reports that the Disney has purchased the rights to Moneyball author Michael Lewis’s Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life, and has hired him to write the script. The book, which came out in 2005, “tells the true story of Lewis's journey to rediscover his influential baseball mentor.” It seems that most of the Lewis’s backlist is destined for some kind of screen treatment: The author is adapting Liar’s Poker, his tragicomic take on ’80s Wall Street, for Warner Bros; Paramount is currently working on the movie version of The Big Short, his account of the 2008 financial meltdown; ABC has bought the rights to his 2010 volume Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood; and of course there’s Moneyball, staring Brad Pitt as the maverick General Manager Billy Beane.
At the Paris Review blog, Margaret Eby goes on a literary pilgrimage to Mississippi’s capital: “There are certain towns that are forever linked with the authors who lived there. Oxford, Mississippi, is Faulkner land, parts of New Orleans’s Toulouse Street belong irrevocably to Tennessee Williams, and Monroeville, Alabama, is Harper Lee’s territory as surely as if it had been marked on the state map. If Jackson, Mississippi, had a patron saint, it would be Eudora Welty.”
If this homage to ocean rowboater John Fairfax isn’t the best New York Times obituary ever, we challenge you to find a better one.
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has a world-class collection of literary artifacts, including a Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare folios, and James Joyce manuscripts, among the archives of many litterateurs. But in recent years, the Center has also been snapping up the private papers of Denis Johnson, Jayne Anne Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, and other contemporary authors (as well as the library of David Foster Wallace). “Something else happens when the scribblings of a living artist are placed alongside those of the greats,” the Atlantic’s Anne Trubeck claims in a recent profile. “The center is out to play a role in literary-canon formation.”
