Legendary publisher Barney Rosset passed away yesterday at the age of ninety. From the helm of Grove Press, Rosset was one of the first to publish Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, David Mamet and Malcolm X, among others, and spent years in court defending his books from charges of obscenity. (This was the the subject of a 2011 documentary about Rosset, Obscene). He also published the literary magazine The Evergreen Review, which still exists online. Here's a Paris Review interview with Rosset, and a 2008 profile of him by Louisa Thomas.
Why was Kanye West thanked in Patrick French’s 2008 biography of V. S. Naipaul? Paul Wachter investigates.
Deborah Eisenberg and Wallace Shawn will read from Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol at the Center for Fiction tonight. If you haven’t already, read Marjorie Perloff’s essay on Rezzori in the most recent issue of Bookforum, and here’s a 1988 BOMB interview with the man himself.
After leaving the Village Voice last month, longtime film critic and Bookforum contributor J. Hoberman has found a new gig, joining Blouin Artinfo as the site’s chief film critic.
Abraham Lincoln has been commemorated on coinage, through statues, and in literature. But until recently, never before have the last two been combined. In honor of President’s Day, a group of historians constructed a thirty-four-foot tour of books about Lincoln, which they set-up in the lobby of a center affiliated with Ford's Theatre. According to Ford’s director Paul Tetreault, over 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln—more than anybody in history except Jesus.
A correspondent for Science explains how his “dance your phD” party became a successful online video competition.
