paper trail

May 21, 2013 @ 1:48:00 pm

Michelle Tea

The New York Times Opinionator blog reads disgraced former BBC broadcaster Jimmy Savile’s biography in light of Lolita and the literary tradition of “female pedagogical pedophilia”—that is, books “fixated on the sexual awakening of schoolgirls.”

Also in Lolita-land, at the NYRB, Mark Ford considers a spate of new Nabokov books, and re-reads the master’s classic with an eye to the question: Was Humbert Humbert Jewish?

A University of Colorado librarian is being sued for millions by an academic publisher for writing a series of blog posts in which he characterized the company of engaging in suspect business practices. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Beall accused OMICS “of spamming scholars with invitations to publish, quickly accepting their papers, then charging them a nearly $3,000 publishing fee after a paper has been accepted.”

Michelle Tea talks with Buzzfeed about her new queer YA novel Mermaid in Chelsea Creek.

After selling more than a million copies of his latest novel in roughly a week in Japan, Haruki Murakami has signed a deal to have the book, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, translated into English. Murakami will work with Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin, who translated 1Q84 and is currently at work on another Murakami title, Talking With Seiji Ozawa About Music. "I'm very much interested in this book, which reminds me of Norwegian Wood. But first, I will have to finish translating the book I am working on," Rubin told a Japanese newspaper. The translation is expected to hit shelves in 2014.

Vice runs “Thought and Memory,” a new short story by Ed Park about “two talking crows named for Odin’s information-gathering ravens in Norse mythology, who belong to a mysterious woman with a glass eye and an oddly chosen tattoo,” alongside illustrations by San Francisco-based artist Yina Kim.