South African novelist Nadine Gordimer died yesterday evening at her home in Johannesburg. She was 90. Rachel Aviv reviewed Gordimer’s Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black for Bookforum in 2008.
Germany has won the World Cup. The tournament was record-breaking for Univision, which has enjoyed very high numbers of viewers in Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, and New York. Even before yesterday’s finals, the network had drawn 80 million viewers, 60 percent more than it did for the 2010 games.
The New York Times considers the Amazon monopoly through one of Amazon’s writers, Vincent Zandri: “He is edited by Amazon editors and promoted by Amazon publicists to Amazon customers, nearly all of whom read his books in electronic form on Amazon’s e-readers, Amazon’s tablets and, soon, Amazon’s phones. His novels are not sold in bookstores, and rarely found in public libraries. His reviews are written by Amazon readers on the Amazon website. ”
In Britain, the chief executive of the Society of Authors argues that publishers’ terms aren’t “fair or sustainable.”
Adam Kirsch responds to Adam Bellow’s recent calls for a revival of conservative literature. “If you are not allowed to say that life in America can be bad, that Americans can be guilty as well as innocent, that good sometimes (most of the time?) loses out to evil—in short, that life in America is like human life in any other time or place—then you cannot be a literary writer, because you have censored your impressions of reality in advance.”
At the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv on teachers cheating in Atlanta.
The New Inquiry has released a supplement on Lana del Rey that features a piece by Johanna Fateman, a regular Bookforum contributor. Fateman most recently wrote for Bookforum about the novelist, short-story writer, and critic Lynne Tillman.