paper trail

Mar 21, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

Chris Kyle

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may be winding down, but military memoirs written by former soldiers—such as Chris Kyle’s bestseller American Sniper—are gaining momentum. “I’ve been doing these kinds of books for 15 years, but it’s not until recently that they have really taken off,” said Marc Resnick, an executive editor at St. Martin’s Press, told the New York Times. The paper notes that the last time this genre was so big was in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Why isn’t Mike Daisey like John D’Agata? Simple, says Slate: Because Daisey wasn’t up front with his audience—or his editors. At the New Inquiry, Aaron Bady weighs in on fact/fiction blends: “If we only emphasize the lies in these accounts, we thereby overlook the extent to which they were saying true things.” And what about David Sedaris’s 1999 book Naked, about which he once said: “I mean, I exaggerate. But all the situations were true.”

The Paris Review talks with New York Review of Books editor and founder Bob Silvers about his stint at the Paris Review, his decision to found his own magazine, and how he got the country’s top thinkers and reviewers to write for him for free: “The essays were simply model book reviews—they made the book review form not just a report on the book and a judgment of the book, but an essay in itself. And that, I think, startled everyone—that a book review could be exciting in that way, could be provocative in that way.”

After dismissing Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl in an early round of The Tournament of Books, Edith Zimmerman and Zambreno sit down to talk things over, and to take a second look at the novel.

Move over, vampires. In light of the success of Fifty Shades of Gray, the sleeper “mommy porn” hit that has become an international bestseller, publishers say that we can expect to see more “female-targeted erotica packaged for the mainstream reader.” As one insider told Forbes, Every major publisher will be taking the genre seriously now.”

Starting on April 10th, the numer of New York Times's articles available for non-subscribers to read online goes from twenty to ten a month.