paper trail

Mar 27, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

Chuck Palahniuk

After eight years at the helm of Vice, former editor Jesse Pearson left the magazine in 2010 with relatively little fanfare. But come September, Pearson is preparing to return to the magazine world with Exploded View Quarterly, a new publication aiming to fall somewhere in the “center of the lit-mag spectrum—neither a twee indie journal tailored to precious 20-somethings nor a highbrow M.F.A.-department circular.” The quarterly is co-founded by hardcore musician and writer Sam McPheeters, who just published his first novel, The Loom of Ruin.

Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk is doing fine after a freak car accident in Washington State last weekend. According to UPI, Palahniuk was parked in a driveway when the driver of a semi-trailer took a turn too quickly, and went rolling off the highway into Palahniuk’s car. Both the trailer and Palahniuk’s car were totalled, but neither Palahniuk nor the driver were injured.

Commentary assesses the state of the “literary canon” by determining which authors are being written about the most. According to the MLA International Bibliography, since 1947, Henry James and William Faulkner have inspired the most academic writing, with Eliot, Melville, and Nabokov as runners up. Of the top twenty-five most written-about writers, only five are women, and only one—Toni Morrison—is still alive.

Facebook makes a questionable trademark claim on the word book.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has awarded English novelist David Mitchell the $20,000 E.M. Forster prize. The money is designed to help “a young writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland for a stay in the United States.”

Librarians at the New York Public Library films a trailer for an imaginary thriller.