paper trail

Mar 5, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

Sheila Heti

Why does Wall Street appear so rarely in fiction? John Lanchester claims it’s because explaining the intricacies of high finance would bog down good storytelling. Explanation, he says, is “fine in small doses, as a dollop of rationale before the main course of drama, but anything longer and the reader wakes hours later to the familiar clanking noise of the milkman delivering bottles to the front door.”

Salman Rushdie will chair this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, and participants will include Martin Amis, Colson Whitehead, and Marjane Satrapi. We were thrilled to see that Elevator Repair Service, the Downtown theater group who brought us the brilliant staging of The Great Gatsby, will be performing.

The eighteen-room, Greek revival home in Brooklyn where Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s just sold for $12 million—$6 million below the initial asking price.

Marilyn Monroe may be dead, but that didn’t stop The Believer’s Sheila Heti from interviewing her.

At the AWP convention in Chicago last weekend, we saw great events (Eileen Myles and Monica Youn) and lots of new books (finished copies of Edouard Leve’s Autoportrait), but nothing surprised us quite as much as seeing—and touching—Edward Gorey’s fur coat, which the writer notoriously wore to the New York Ballet (with Converse). The writer A. N. Devers, who now owns the coat, would even let you try it on.

The American Scholar explains how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up anticipated the rise of autobiographical essay writing in America.

In case you missed it, Slate’s monthly book review launched last weekend, and it’s pretty awesome.