Joy Press, author of Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television, has written a new piece for Vanity Fair about novelists’ shifting attitudes toward writing for TV. They used to scoff at the prospect, but now most writers dream of writing for the small screen. “If you eavesdrop on any gathering of serious writers, they’re as likely to be discussing Killing Eve or Better Call Saul as they are the latest book by Zadie Smith or Rachel Kushner,” Press writes. “Even the University of Iowa is launching TV-writing programs this fall.”
In the UK, the Society of Authors has issued a angry letter addressed to major publishers, responding to a new study showing that the median income for writers dropped to 10,500 pounds a year. “What concerns us is that during the same period that we see authors’ earnings plummet, the large publishers are seeing their sales rocket,” says Society of Authors chief executive Nicola Solomon.
It is rumored that Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep will star in Greta Gerwig’s new film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
Dennis Lim, the author of David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, compares the points of view of the Blue Velvet director and Donald Trump. “While Lynch did not vote for Trump, you can see how the mind behind the grotesque screaming baby of “Eraserhead” and the sociopathic id-monster that is Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth (“Baby wants to fuck!”) would regard the President with a detached aesthetic fascination,” Lim writes. “And therein lies the problem with Lynch’s comments. They are irksome not because they endorse Trump—as numerous headlines falsely declared—but because they represent the privileged position of distance.”
Bomb has published four new poems by The Argonauts author Maggie Nelson.
