Following in the footsteps of Geoff Dyer, Teju Cole has spent four days on “Roi des Belges, an art installation in the form of a one-room hotel in the shape of a boat.” Day one: “We wake up on the boat. The sky is white, wide. In bed I read Heart of Darkness... I toy with the idea that my essay for Artangel will begin with the words ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’”
Jami Attenberg, a forty-year-old freelance writer who has published three books, is broke. In an essay for the Rumpus, she reflects on the twenty-six places she slept last year.
Architectural designer John H. Locke tells the New York Times in article about his project of secretly installing lightweight bookshelves in pay phones across New York City.
When Wikipedia editors wouldn’t let him correct an entry about the motivation for his novel, The Human Stain, Philip Roth wrote a letter to the editors asking thm to remove the mistake. Soon after, he was told by officials “that I, Roth, was not a credible source: 'I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,' writes the Wikipedia Administrator—‘but we require secondary sources.’” Now, Roth writes about the matter for the New Yorker’s website.
The ever-progressive DC Comics has unveiled the latest Green Lantern: Simon Baz, “Muslim from Dearborn, Michigan, who leaves behind street racing to join an intergalactic police force.”
Why did Bret Easton Ellis throw a tantrum about David Foster Wallace on Twitter last week? Former Penguin and Norton editor Gerald Howard explains that the bad blood has to do when when the two were getting their start in the late '80s. “So there it was: two hot (sorry) young writers of about the same age, wildly different in style and temperament, inhabiting the same crowded literary space and clearly getting on each other’s nerves... At the moment, the Wallace style is dominant and that is what drives Bret Ellis nuts.”
Listen to Fran Lebowitz read her classic essay, “Writing: A Life Sentence” as an audiobook.
