paper trail

Jun 6, 2012 @ 12:54:00 am

George W.S. Trow

News from the BEA: New York Review Books has announced that it will launch an e-book series called NYRB Lit in the Fall. Edited by frequent New York Review of Books contributor Sue Halpern, the series, which will include fictino and nonfiction, will release ten e-books a year. The first two will be Lindsay Clarke's The Water Theatre and Zena el Khalil's Beirut, I Love You: A Memoir.

Amazon has bought the backlist rights to more than three thousand titles by Avalon Books, a sixty-two-year-old publishing house that specializes in mystery, romance, and Western novels.

Norman Mailer and William S. Burroughs both violently attacked their wives. Charles Bukowski was a raging misogynist. And yet more often than not, writers are forgiven for their bad behavior. At Litreactor, John Jarzemsky wonders why “we not only excuse our authors from being assholes, we celebrate them for it.”

The story reverberating across Washington D.C. Twitter feeds today is GQ’s account of the financial decline of liberal policy magazine the American Prospect, which needs to raise $1.2 million by mid-June in order to stay afloat. Since announcing its dire situation several weeks ago, the magazine has raised $900,000, but it’s still not enough. The entire staff is preparing to take a temporary fifty-percent pay cut, followed by a weeklong furlough.

Science blogger and author Jonah Lehrer has signed on as a staff writer at The New Yorker. (Also at The New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson pens a lovely remembrance of longtime staffer George W.S. Trow, author of the prescient Within the Context of No Context.)

A minor scandal rocked the world of digital publishing this week when it was discovered that an electronic edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace put out by Barnes and Noble had replaced all instances of the world “kindled” with “Nookd”—a reference to the company’s e-reader. Ben Greenman wonders how works by Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson would read if the same switch were made.

In response to Christian Lorentzen’s musing in our latest issue about what future Occupy Wall Street novels will look like, The Millions proposes that at least one example already exists—even if the book predated the movement: Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story.