paper trail

Nov 18, 2011 @ 4:00:00 am

Keith Gessen getting arrested.

Readers! Our Dec/Jan issue is now online. Check out the table of contents, then rush out and buy an issue!

Jenny Diski does not care about crime writer Lindsay Ashford's claim that Jane Austen may have died of arsenic poisoning.

Jesmyn Ward, Stephen Greenblatt, and Nikky Finney won National Book awards for fiction, non-fiction and poetry, respectively. Samples of their books are available here.

What can you learn about a small, turn-of-the-century town from library ledgers? At Slate, John Plotz writes about a surprisingly comprehensive database that tracks the borrowing records of the Muncie Public Library between 1891 and 1902.

Twenty-three journalists have been arrested while covering the Occupy Wall Street protests, including reporters from Vanity Fair, the New York Daily News, the Associated Press and NPR. (A complete list is being compiled online by Josh Stearns). Dozens of others were also arrested while attempting to delay the opening of the Stock Exchange on Thursday, as well as Sarah Leonard and n+1 editor Keith Gessen, who recently wrote about the movement for the London Review of Books.

“All abuse and tyranny on the part of the employers must stop; Employees must be permitted the use of sufficient electric light,” and electric fans must be installed in warm weather: three of the demands from the first publishing strike in America, which took place in 1934 at the Macaulay Company publishing house.

Last week, Jonathan Lethem, who recently likened the literary world to high school, posted a piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books detailing his frustration over James Woods’s mixed review of The Fortress of Solitude. Now, The Millions has published a brief history of author dust-ups—and lower down, in the comments section, Woods responds to Lethem’s accusations.