After watching the trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, The Paris Review Daily retreated into the film archives and returned with a rare cinematic Gatsby—silent footage from a 1926 adaptation of the book.
Russian publishers have refused to touch British historian Orlando Figes’s 2007 book about life in Stalinist Russia, but perhaps not for the reasons Figes claims. While Figes says that his book was censored for its political content, in a June article for The Nation, political scientists Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen argue that it was more likely passed over on account of Figes’s shoddy scholarship. For starters, a study of Figes’s materials conducted by a Russian human-rights organization found that The Whisperers contains “a startling number of minor and major errors,” and concluded that “its publication ‘as is’ . . . would cause a scandal in Russia.”
Two political wives have books coming out this week: First Lady Michelle Obama, whose American Grown is about the White House organic garden, and Carole Geithner, wife of of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Geithner’s book, Only, is a YA novel about a girl "navigating a landscape of adolescent awkwardness in the wake of her mother’s death."
Forty-five years after publishing his debut novel, The Origin of the Brunists, Robert Coover is preparing a sequel. In a 1966 review of the book, Webster Schott remarked, “Robert Coover writes his first novel as if he doesn't expect to make it to a second.” And yet he did. The follow-up, The Brunist Day of Wrath, will come out in September 2013 with Dzanc books.
In tandem with proQuest and the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford and ProQuest, Queen Elizabeth II has set up a website featuring the complete personal journals of Queen Victoria. After Victoria’s death, her daughter, Princess Beatrice, spent the following three decades transcribing—and redacting—much of the journals.
For your morning amusement: a Robyn/avante-garde poetry mashup.
A roundup of paintings by famous writers. Does anybody else think that Kurt Vonnegut’s cartoon bears more than a passing resemblance to a David Shrigley work?
