Next Friday, February 12, Bookforum will host a Valentine’s reading at the New Museum. “Trial and Error,” a tribute to love’s vicissitudes (in previous years we’ve named it “Bad Trips,” “Wasted Youth,” and “The Night We Called it a Day”), will feature readings by Mary Gaitskill, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Marx, A. O. Scott, and Christopher Sorrentino.
No one seems quite ready to believe that Amazon now plans to open hundreds of physical bookstores, but if you’re on the west coast, weren’t put off by that New York Times story, and have “the ability to lift 50 lbs,” you might just have a shot at a job.
And it seems fair, or at least tempting, to say that you could do a lot worse (both professionally and in terms of reading material).
Alexander Chee writes in the New Republic about the odd status of the historical novel, from War and Peace—which “holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate”—to Hilary Mantel’s tour de force of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, which she was initially unable to publish, to the “trepidation” in friends’ eyes when he described his own second novel, “as if I had announced that I was giving up years of hard work writing literary fiction to sell out and become a hack.” And the Rumpus interviews Chee about that novel, The Queen of the Night, “structured like a five act opera,” and how, while writing it, “I often thought I was losing my mind, or that I’d done something that would kill me before I finished it.”
Now that Tina Fey has signed a deal with Universal Pictures to make a movie based on a Good Housekeeping article, we can’t help wondering whether or not writers there are bound by New Yorker–style rules about such things.
As primary season rolls on, you may want to refamiliarize yourself with our editor Chris Lehmann’s thoughts on the Republican field (sans Trump).
