The VIDA count for 2013 has been released.
Carl Van Vechten was a New York socialite, a “best-selling writer of scandalous novels,” connoisseur of American literature, and a champion of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Nella Larsen and Langston Hughes. He was also a photographer, and shot portraits of thousands of cultural figures. At the FSG blog, Edward White, the author of The Tastemaker, posts and writes detailed captions for fifteen Van Vechten photographs—of Harry Belafonte, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, W.E.B. DuBois, and others.
At Bookslut, the shortlist for the Daphne award, a reconsideration of the best book of 1963, was announced on Friday.
Tonight at Housing Works, Keith Gessen, Emily Gould, Carla Blumenkranz, Eli S. Evans and Mel Flashman join Chad Harbach for the launch of MFA vs. NYC: Two Cultures of American Fiction.
In the New Yorker, Jhumpa Lahiri remembers her 2009 meeting with Mavis Gallant in Paris, saying of the writer (who passed away last week at the age of 91): “The defiant choice she made, to live as an expatriate, without family, and solely by means of her writing, was and remains a revolutionary act. Both in life and on the page, she blazed a trail no one since has dared follow.”