Novelist Paulo Coehlo picks a fight with the master of modernism. Speaking to a Brazilian newspaper, Coehlo remarked, "one of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce's Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit."
John Banville, or rather, his alter ego, Benjamin Black, will revive Raymond Chandler’s famous noir detective Phillip Marlowe in a new novel set to come out next year. According to publisher Henry Holt, “the book will have an original plot and take place in the 1940s. The setting will remain in Bay City – Chandler’s fictional stand-in for Santa Monica, California – and feature Chandler’s hallmark noir ambience.”
An Authors Guild lawsuit led by writer Scott Turow is demanding that Google pay $750 per author for every book uploaded to Google Books without prior permission. While the suit has been ongoing since 2005—when Google began digitizing millions of books without seeking the consent of authors—a judge has agreed to hear summary judgment motions next month.
Roxanne Gay responds to Jacob Silverman’s recent Slate essay about the epidemic of niceness in online book reviewing culture: “If literary culture is a school, serious criticism can be found in the classroom. Social networks are the cafeteria — what you find there will be loud and gossipy, amusing but not very satisfying.”
Amazon is getting into the textbook rental racket.
The real-life protagonist of Dave Egger’s nonfiction book Zeitoun appeared in a New Orleans court yesterday for allegedly beating his wife with a tire iron outside a lawyer’s office last July. Although the couple divorced earlier this year, Abdulrahman Zeitoun was already on probation at the time for assaulting his wife the year prior. In Zeitoun, Eggers tells the story of Zeitoun’s wrongful arrest and detention in the wake of Hurricane Katrina after he was mistaken for a terrorist.
The New Yorker releases a very long and very star-powered commercial (Lena Dunham! Jon Hamm! Alex Karpovsky!) for the launch of their iPhone app.
