Was Amanda Knox a cunning murderer, a “mouse in a cat’s game,” or simply a young American who was ensnared by the labyrinthine Italian legal system? The new memoir by the American exchange student who was convicted of murdering her roommate while studying abroad in Italy is both a case for her innocence and a bildungsroman, writes Michiko Kakutani.
Benjamin Schwarz, who has edited the Atlantic's books and ideas section since 2000, has left the magazine, and been replaced by longtime Slate editor Ann Hulbert.
At Poetry, Laura Sims introduces a feature in which she will publish selected postcards and letters from her seven-year correspondence with David Markson.
After the London Review of Books published an essay by James Lasdun in 2007, the magazine received a letter from his stalker threatening them not to repeat the act: “His writing is boring and doesn’t sell. Stop publishing that hairy-nosed Jewish wanna-be-Protestant bore of a boar. His wife’s cunt smells of dead rabbits. His girlfriends are the most hideous.”
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tries his hand at poetry.
Time Out has a nice roundup of the city’s best new independent bookstores.
Shelley Wanger recalls what it was like being an assistant at the New York Review of Books in 1975: “In the morning, it was usually rather quiet until Bob dashed in—a tornado of energy—around 10 or 10:30, having already been up at dawn calling Europe from home or pulling an all-nighter on some review not in good shape.”
