paper trail

Mar 27, 2013 @ 5:34:00 pm

Non-Nobel Prize winner Junot Diaz

A slip of the tongue on the Steven Colbert show this week led the talk show host to mistakenly award Junot Diaz the Nobel Prize—which may in fact be the only prize left that Diaz hasn’t won.

It’s widely speculated that Proust was gay, and the recent publication of his first-ever poem—a piece called “Pederasty,” penned when he was only 17—only corroborates the theory.

At Hazlitt, Sarah Nicole Prickett has an inspired piece about “the gentle art of making enemies” with a focus on Renata Adler and Azealia Banks.

Is literary fiction a standalone genre? The New York Review of Books’ publishing arm thinks so—last year, editor Sue Halpern declared as much when she launched the NYRB Lit e-books series. While the verdict is still out, NYRB Lit is defining what qualifies with its releases, which so far includeKiran Nagarkar's Ravan and Eddie, “a Marathi tale of two boys growing up in Bombay;” Markus Werner's On the Edge, and Yoram Kaniuk's 1948, “a prize-winning Hebrew memoir of Israel's war of independence.”

At the Paris Review Daily, A Map of Tulsa author Benjamin Lytal considers the nuances and difficulties of writing about place: “People pretend the idea of fact-checking fiction is hilarious and a paradox and maybe even scandalously bureaucratic and wrongheaded. But when fiction gets facts wrong, people care. If a novel claims to be about a real place, people say, It should at least get the street names right. If somebody writes a story about Manhattan, and he mixes up the streets, he’s expected to fix it.”

A collection of newly discovered materials by F. Scott Fitzgerald—including an unpublished, six-stanza poem addressed to an eight-year-old—go up for auction online this week. The cache is expected to sell for between $75,000 and $100,000.