paper trail

Apr 30, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

Heidi Julavits

In Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk has opened a museum that mirrors his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence.

The University of Southern California has gotten a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to develop a video game based on Henry David Thoreau’s writings about Walden Pond. In the game, “the player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods.”

At last week’s London Book Fair, when writers and agents weren’t discussing the fallout from the Justice Department’s charges against e-book publishers, they were signing books deals. According to Publishers Weekly, William T. Vollmann and Erik Larson both sold new books, agent Carmen Balcells sold the Chinese rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude for a million dollars, and OKCupid founder Christian Rudder signed a book deal with Crown to write a nonfiction book called Dataclysm about “how data is transforming our lives.”

The publication of Bring Up the Bodies, Hillary Mantel’s much-anticipated sequel to her Tudor-era Wolf Hall, raises the question—do you need to read the first book before picking up the sequel?

Heidi Julavits discusses the editorial evolution of The Believer from a print-only magazine oriented towards 4,000-plus word pieces to a publication that can compete in the online economy of literary blogs and divided attention.

“Books will be smoother, faster, and slicker, and will be strongly influenced by space travel.” Thus spake bookseller Robert Berg to the Seattle Times in April 1962 when asked what the book industry would look like in the 21st Century.

The last time the New Yorker came close to changing its eccentric stance on diaeresis (not be confused with an umlaut) was 1978. Copy editor Mary Norris explains why.

McSweeney's offers some tips on how to write better.