Darren Aronofsky is adapting Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy for HBO.
The bracket, books, and judges for Three Percent’s World Cup of Literature have been announced. Representing the US is David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, because the book, as the tournament’s organizers explain, is a lot like the national team: “An unfinished product, made of various pieces, and all about boredom (which is how some people in the States view soccer as a whole).”
The New Yorker has launched a new blog by Joshua Rothman on art and science.
Karl Ove Knausgaard arrived in New York last week to tour in support of the third volume of his epic autobiographical novel, and, true to form, doesn’t seem happy about being world literature’s latest star, telling the packed audience at McNally Jackson books: “I really don’t like myself,” “being miserable is a part of being a writer,” and “I can’t really embrace A manuscript of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, his first published novel, will be on display for one day at Reading University. Beckett scholar John Pilling puts it in perspective: “These things are valuable, though of course only exciting to sad people like me. . . . It is not his greatest work, but it is the earliest fiction manuscript we have, his first published novel, relatively readable and still funny, and these are precious qualities.”