After listening to Rachel Kushner read at Bookforum’s New Museum event on Tuesday, Choire Sicha is exhorting his readers to pre-order copies of Kushner’s forthcoming novel, The Flamethrowers. (We second his advice.)
The New York Times has reported that Time Warner is in early talks toshed most of its Time Inc. magazine titles—which include People, InStyle, and Real Simple.
At Salon, Ben Nugent argues that novelists like Jeff Eugenides and Ben Lerner have found a new tactic for avoiding the saccharine language that’s often associated with writing about love. These writers “get away with great warmth—courtship stories that aren’t so different from Hollywood romantic comedies, stories that flirt with cheesiness, triviality, sentimentalism—by using a particular cold vocabulary, the vocabulary of theory.”
Blogger Matt Kahn is going to review every novel that held the number one position on the annual Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list going back to 1913. That’s one hundred years and ninety-four books, starting with Winston Churchill’s The Inside of the Cup.
According to research done by the US Census Bureau, bookstore sales for 2012 were $15.21 billion, only a slight decline from the 2011 estimate of $15.28 billion.
John Leonard once wrote that it’s a mistake for writers to describe dreams in fiction. Not true, says Nicholson Baker at the New York Review of Books blog. “In the book I just finished writing, I included a dream in which my narrator finds an old bicycle horn on a set of subway stairs somewhere near Columbia. Why not? It’s a dream I actually had a few years ago.”
