After more than twenty years as Vanity Fair’s “Hot Type” columnist, Elissa Schappell has announced on Facebook that she is bidding the magazine “a fond farewell.” Schappell, whose books include the story collection Blueprints for Building Better Girls, plans to devote more time to her own writing.
Restless former New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones has left his latest gig at the Los Angeles Times after less than a year.
Brian Evenson has an eerie new piece up on People Holding (which publishes short fiction prompted by found photographs of people holding things): “No matter which way we turned the girl, she didn’t have a face. There was hair in front and hair in the back—only saying which was the front and which was the back was impossible.”
Unlike Wayne Barrett’s, Harry Hurt III’s 1993 unauthorized biography of Donald Trump will apparently not be reissued because its publisher, Norton, feels it would be “very dangerous” to do so (Hurt’s reaction to the news, according to Page Six: “Boy, wow! That is really chickens sh-t!”). Hurt will now have the right to take it elsewhere, if he can find a publisher who doesn’t fear legal action. He told Page Six he feels that “The American public needs to know the truth about The Donald’s life history before they cast their ballots.”
Whit Stillman, director of The Last Days of Disco and Metropolitan, talks about his new film, Love & Friendship, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s early epistolary novella Lady Susan: “Lots of comic gold, which sometimes seem to be more Oscar Wildean than Austenian, but she was decades ahead of him.”
This is the week of the three-day Norwegian-American Literary Festival (cohosted by The Paris Review), which opens on Thursday with readings at Black Bear Bar by Rachel Kushner, Ben Lerner, Ben Marcus, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, and continues with Friday’s discussion at 192 Books between the Norwegian writers Helga Flatland, Johan Harstad, and Maja Lunde.
