A forthcoming documentary on J.D. Salinger has so far been shrouded in secrecy, but with the film coming out soon, details are starting to emerge. Among them, one “big reveal” is that before he died Salinger “instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015.” Included are new stories about the Glass and Caulfield families. The film also elaborates on Salinger’s personal relationships, including his marriage to his first wife, who was suspected of being a Gestapo agent, and his relationship to a fourteen-year-old girl he met on a beach in Florida and corresponded with for years afterwards.
Faced with dwindling numbers of tourists, Parisian hotels are playing up their literary heritages (or imagined literary heritages) to attract new guests.
At the New York Review of Books blog, Bookforum contributor Suzy Hansen talks about how anti-government activism in Turkey has been heavily driven by female protestors, and how over the past decade, the conservative Erdogan government has systematically brought down the standards of living for Turkish women.
Now that Amazon has removed the barriers to entry for aspiring authors, traditional publishers are being cast as the villains. One publisher, Cargo Books’ Mark Buckland, faced off against self-published authors at the Edinburgh International Book Fair.
“They’re calling him New York’s Dostoevsky:” The London Times profiles Naked Singularity author Sergio De La Pava. The piece begins describing De La Pava as “small and fiery... an exploding fireworks factory of laughter, street talk, curse words and insatiable erudition.”
In the New York Times Opinion pages, novelist Mark Slouka argues that the fastest way to lose a friend who’s a writer is to ask them what they’re working on before they’ve finished it:“If writers agree on anything — which is unlikely — it’s that nothing can damage a novel in embryo as quickly and effectively as trying to describe it before it’s ready.”
