Three pairs of Philip Larkin’s eyeglasses are now on display at a British eye clinic. “I wouldn’t say Philip Larkin himself would be quite so chuffed with being associated with the National Health Services," quipped one local politician. "He was a hypochondriac."
The Massachusetts-based Paris Press has announced plans to re-release Virginia Woolf’s 64-page essay “On Being Ill,” which considers illness, alongside “love, battle, and jealousy [as one of] the prime themes of literature.” The essay will be run alongside “Notes from Sick Rooms,” an essay by Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, and will be released this November. Read Francine Prose's thoughts on the essay from the Spring 2003 issue of Bookforum.
Billionaire private-equity CEO Leon Black has bought the art-book publisher Phaidon Press.
After no new sponsors were willing to back the Orange Prize, private donors have stepped in to cover the costs—and ensure the continuation—of the UK’s only fiction prize for women. Earlier this year, mobile services company Orange announced that it would cease to fund to the prize, which started seventeen years ago and has been awarded to Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Orange Prize officials said this week that while they were still looking for long-term corporate sponsorship to cover the six-figure costs, enough money had been raised to temporarily sustain what will now be known as, simply, "the women’s prize for fiction."
TV writer Kelly Marcel has been chosen to adapt Fifty Shades of Gray into a screenplay, and Bret Easton Ellis (who was really, really angling for the job on Twitter) is none too pleased about the decision.
The annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society convened in Brooklyn for three days last week to celebrate their good sense and sensibility and listen to lectures on the late muse. More than seven hundred people turned out for the affair, which included talks by authors (Anna Quindlen on male condescension to Austen) and afficionados (Cisco Systems co-founder Sandy Lerner on cash in Austen novels). “This is a place where people can let their Jane Austen freak flag fly,” remarked an attendee who founded an Austen-themed tea company.
Introducing the Paris Review app.
