A curtain call for Ted Willams at the Library of America, as John Updike's classic essay on Williams, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," is republished as a new volume, fifty years after the Splendid Splinter's last at bat, in which he blasted a homer and then didn't tip his cap to the crowd.
Surfing the Voice Literary Supplement's online archives with artforum.com editor-at-large Brian Sholis.
Take a long lunch break—or the day off—and wander over to the PEN American Center's World Voices Festival this afternoon. Among the many edifying events is "Utopia and Dystopia: Geographies of the Possible," with authors Jonathan Lethem, Eshkol Nevo, Andrzej Stasiuk, and Inga Kuznetsova; moderated by Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio. And if you can't get away from your desk, PEN is streaming many of the events live on their website.
"What's in a Tweet?" Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center are developing new ways to process the torrent of Twitter info; and though the nearly hieroglyphic text blasts are hard for machines to parse, there's a new approach that might help. Meanwhile, book publishers wonder: does Twitter sell books?; The Observer's Paul Young conducts a "quasi-scientific study." Indeed, Twitter may be the best place to share book opinions and gossip, but the L Magazine can't figure out "who to hate most in this NY Times piece about Twitter pedants who obsess over grammar in tweets: the writer (for giving them more attention), the people who actually tweet in all caps, the celebrities who tweet self-serving banalities, or the pedants themselves."
A digest of the publishing industry's April news and moves, including Sean McDonald's decamping to FSG, the NYT's Mokoto Rich's departure from the book beat to the paper's Business Day section, and more.
