Ira Silverberg, the director of literature programs for the National Endowment for the Arts, has announced that he’ll be leaving his position on July 11. Silverberg, who has been an influential publisher (at Grove Press) and a literary agent (at Sterling Lord), says he plans to return to New York. He’ll be temporarily replaced by NEA literature program officer Amy Stolls.
Details about Shane Salerno's forthcoming J.D. Salinger documentary, which has been eight years in the making, have been shrouded in secrecy. The Weinstein Company has now released of the film’s trailer, but don't watch it hoping for any major revelations.
And elsewhere in literary film news, The New Yorker runs an excerpt of scenes Cormac McCarthy wrote for the upcoming Ridley Scott film, The Counselor.
In response to the all-male editors cover of Post magazine, Jessica Grose considers the question of why people don’t think women’s magazines run serious journalism.
Yale has acquired a rare collection of six hundred books and manuscripts relating to the cultural and intellectual history of English law. The archive is ten times as large at the Library of Congress’s collection and includes a number of rare and odd finds, including “a pocket-size 14th-century handwritten copy of Magna Carta, the first book on the legal rights of women published in England, letters from the 18th-century jurist William Blackstone and papers belonging to a real-life London lawyer praised by Charles Dickens’s fictional yes-man Uriah Heep.”
For the first time since his debut novel V, Thomas Pynchon has set a novel primarily in New York. The Atlantic looks at Pynchon’s personal history in New York, and contemplates why he’s returning to it with Bleeding Edge.
