paper trail

Apr 17, 2012 @ 12:56:00 am

HHhH author Laurent Binet.

Following the controversy surrounding a Gunther Grass poem that criticizes Israel, Dave Eggers says that he will not attend a ceremony in Bremen, Germany, to accept an award from the Gunter Grass Foundation.

In 2006, Laurent Binet was horrified to learn that another author had published a novel perilously similar (in content, if not in style) to the one he was working on. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones was a sprawling Holocaust novel featuring many of the same Nazi SS officers and administrators that would end up in Binet’s novel-in-progress. To address the overlap, Binet, “began to interpolate passages covering, in real-time, his reading of The Kindly Ones and his fears about what it meant for his book” in his own book, HHhH, which went on to win France’s Prix Goncourt in 2010. These passages were redacted in the U.S. version of the novel (which comes out this week) but now are available to read for the first time at the Millions.

Here’s the trailer for James Franco’s forthcoming Hart Crane biopic.

RJ Wheaton—author of the 33 1/3 book on Portishead’s album Dummy—offers a few tips on how to pitch to the music book series.

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction didn’t go to anybody this year, as jurors determined that none of the three finalists—Denis Johnson for Train Dreams, Karen Russell for Swamplandia, and the late David Foster Wallace for The Pale King—were worthy of the award. This is the first time that a Pulitzer hasn’t been awarded for fiction since 1977, and is causing something of an uproar. Htmlgiant quotes a William Gass essay on the awards: “…the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses.” But as writer Elliott Holt and others have pointed out, this isn’t necessarily a rejection of fiction in 2011. “No awards means no book got a majority vote.” In other news, the Huffington Post also nabbed their first Pulitzer in the category of National Reporting.

The Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin is home to David Foster Wallace’s papers and self-help library, the unpublished essays of Jorge Luis Borges, the papers of Denis Johnson and J.M. Coetzee, and one Gutenberg bible. Soon, it’ll also house T.C. Boyle’s archive. The Center has paid $425,000 for all the scribbles and research notes that went into his twenty-four books and 150 short stories. All of which, Boyle |about:blank|told| the Los Angeles Times, are in “exceptional” condition: "Not too many bloodstains, no insects, no rat turds, no rat corpses."

Pop quiz: The Awl challenges you to differentiate between sentences written by Edith Wharton and lines from reviews of Lena Dunham’s Girls?