In an interview with the French magazine Les InRocks, Philip Roth announced that he’s done writing novels. “To tell you the truth, I’m done,” Roth remarked. “Nemesis will be my last book.” Roth, now 79, has given biographer Blake Bailey access to his letters and papers. But Roth does not plan to grant this privilege to anyone else: The novelist says that he has instructed his executors to destroy his archives after his death.
It has been a busy year for the Oxford American. First, two of the Southern magazine’s editors were fired after being implicated in a bizarre sexual-harassment scandal. Then former Harper’s editor Roger Hodge was hired to take over the magazine last September. Now, there's news that Oxford American is taking on a new challenge: fine Southern dining. Arkansas Business reports that Oxford American is opening a restaurant in the same building as its Little Rock offices. The restaurant, South and Main, will be “essentially an extension of the magazine," chef Matt Bell told the paper.
Valerie Eliot, the widow of T.S. Eliot, died in London on Friday at the age of 86. The couple met in the 1950s through the English publisher Faber and Faber. Despite the forty-year difference between them, they were happily married until the poet's death in 1965.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has acquired two arms of publisher John Wiley & Sons: cookbooks and reference titles.
The Los Angeles Review of Books surveys the literary history of hockey, starting with Sports Illustrated’s 1955 decision to send William Faulkner to report on a game between the New York Rangers and Montreal Canadiens.
The Rumpus is hosting a fundraiser for the film adaptation of Stephen Elliott's novel Happy Baby, and you should get tickets now, while they’re still available. The party will be held on November 29 at Public Assembly in Brooklyn, and will feature readings and appearances by Jami Attenberg, Melissa Febos, Rick Moody, Eugene Mirman, and many others TBA.
