paper trail

Mar 6, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

Kate Bolick

Alexander Star, formerly an editor at Lingua Franca and the New York Times Magazine, is leaving his current position at the New York Times Book Review to become a senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The Awl recounts how in the late 1950s Saul Bellow helped his closest friend get a teaching job—without realizing this so-called friend was sleeping with his wife.

Canada’s National Post is taking a fast and dirty approach to e-books, publishing as many (and as many different kinds) as possible to see what sells.

Timothy McSweeney—after whom Dave Eggers named his notorious literary magazine and publishing company—was not a whimsical invention but a real person. As Eggers tells the Sacramento Bee, the late McSweeney was an artist who was institutionalized for mental illness. “From there, he mailed odd letters to strangers who shared his last name, believing they were relatives.” One of the recipients was Eggers's mother, whose maiden name was McSweeney.

An Internet archivist who has preserved more than 150 billion webpages now wants to do the same for print. Each week, upwards of twenty thousand books arrive at a warehouse in Redmond, California, to be saved for the ages. “We want to collect one copy of every book,” owner Brewster Kahle tells the New York Times. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.”

Tonight in Brooklyn, n+1 has invited sociologist Eric Klinenberg and writers Kate Bolick and Daniel Smith to discuss Going Solo, Klinenberg’s new book about “the extraordinary rise and surprising appeal of living alone.”

We really enjoyed this meditation on the metaphor.

Jesse Ball’s The Curfew, Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, Lars Iyer’s Spurious, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, and Michelle Latiolai’s Widow make up the shortlist of the Believer’s book award. The winner will be announced in the May issue.

Reader, I ...