The new Bookforum is out. Here's Christian Lorentzen's essay on money novels in the 21st century.
Bad news at GOOD: Only a day after releasing its twenty-seventh issue, the mag laid off a large chunk of its editorial staff, including executive editor Ann Friedman, lifestyle editor Amanda Hess, senior editor Cord Jefferson, and associate editor Nona Willis Aronowitz (who edited last year's Out of the Vinyl Deeps, a collection of rock criticism by her mother, Ellen Willis).
To the delight of book publicists everywhere, after a two-year hiatus, Oprah is re-launching her book club (the revived “2.0” book club will be online-only). The former queen of daytime TV announced the news as well as her first selection—Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.
Responding to Arthur Krystal’s argument in the New Yorker that the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction has become more opaque, Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, counters: “we expect literary revolutions to come from above, from the literary end of the spectrum—the difficult, the avant-garde, the high-end, the densely written. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on. Instead we’re getting a revolution from below, coming up from the supermarket aisles.”
Here's how Germany’s fixed-price bookselling system has kept Amazon at bay. And in other Amazon news, the retailer has just patented e-gifting.
After seventy-two years in the closet, the Green Lantern will come out next week.
