Greg Morten’s best-selling book Three Cups of Tea, about his experiences performing charitable work in Afghanistan, may be exaggerated. 60 Minutes investigates, with author Jon Krakauer opining: “It's a beautiful story, and it's a lie.”
Author book signings have long been a staple of literary culture. But how do you sign a Kindle? This May, Autography offers a solution.
A round up of tributes to Brooklyn author L. J. Davis, who recently died at the age of seventy. Davis was best known for his prescient 1971 novel A Meaningful Life (reissued by NYRB classics in 2009), which is the ur-text of Brooklyn gentrification (along with Hal Ashby’s 1970 film The Landlord). At the Awl, Evan Hughes revisits Davis’s classic novel, finding it first-rate because it pulls no punches.
The New York Review of Books has been celebrating National Poetry Month by posting an exemplary poem each day. Over at Slate, critic and poet Craig Morgan Teicher reviews David Orr’s Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry, which confidently and astutely navigates the gulf between contemporary poets and wary readers (for a different take on Orr, see Michael Robbins's review, which calls the book "superfluous").
