paper trail

Mar 23, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

The Occupy Wall Street Library, Zuccotti Park, 2011

Brian McGreevy’s eccentric mystery novel Hemlock Grove—which will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux later this month—is going to be adapted into a Netflix original series.

In Lapham’s Quarterly, Simon Winchester details the mysterious origins and long gestation of the Dictionary of American Regional English, which was started in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1965 and only recently was fully completed.

New York City police confiscated a brand-new Occupy Wall Street Library in Union Square on Wednesday. Activists had rebuilt the library by 7pm, and police took it down by 10pm, prompting a new protest chant: “People got sold out, Books got thrown out!”

Mike Daisey has everybody asking: If you’re a writer, can you make stuff up? Slate addresses the question with a rather funny chart that ranges from fantasy writer (yes) to journalist (no).

Should Amazon be taxed to safeguard local book stores? France thinks so, and it’s safe to guess that Melville House publisher Dennis Loy Johnson would agree.

New York Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof responds to the Village Voice’s response to his Sunday column about Backpage, a Voice-owned site on which, Kristoff says, pimps have run ads for underage prostitutes.

The party never got started at St. Martin’s Press after San Diego police seized two packages containing over eleven pounds of marijuana addressed to “Karen Wright” at the New York publishing house. Turns out, neither Wright nor ABTBooks—the company named on the return address—actually exist. The Smoking Gun website estimates that the pot was valued at upwards of $70,000. The incident has spawned the Twitter hashtag #potlit and inspired at least one pot-themed literary list.