A film adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children has made it past India’s censorship board without any alterations. “India here we come—intact! Great news,” tweeted the film’s director, Deepa Mehta. “Salman Rushdie and I thrilled.” The film, which debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last September, will be released in India early next year.
"Although it is not a popular opinion, I believe that library e-book borrowing erodes ebook sales, at least modestly." At PWXYZ, Peter Brantley weighs in on the advantages and challenges facing libraries that "lend" e-books.
The Algonquin roundtable is gone, Bookstore Row vanished '80s, and all the writers have decamped to Brooklyn. The New York Times’ book critic Dwight Garner goes searching for what remains of literary Manhattan, and what—library-themed hotels, Virginia Woolf-themed bars—have cropped up to replace the old. Garner also solicits advice from Paris Review editor Lorin Stein (Cafe Loup “really is the closest thing I know of to a writer’s hangout in the old-fashioned sense”) and n+1 editor Mark Greif, who’s not a fan of hotels repurposing their lobbies for literary appeal: “Whenever I’m invited to meet anyone in a hotel bar or lobby, it means I’m in for a rough hour, because it means my host has more money than sense.”
On a related note, Tin House resolves the age-old mystery of what writers drink in Paris when they are not writing about drinking in Paris.
The latest issue of the Milan Review consists entirely “Travels in Central America”—a 66-part novella by Clancy Martin about “ sleeping with somebody other than your husband/wife. It is also (principally) a love story and it is also (largely) about drinking too much and also (slightly) about Central America.” For this reason, the editors have started calling their publication The Milan Review of Adultery.
In 1967, the invasion of thirty Black Panthers into the California statehouse in Sacramento launched the modern gun rights movement. An article written forty years later for The Atlantic surveys what happened after, and what the debates look like today.
Slate traces the origins of children’s literature before Hans Christian Andersen.
