Harvard’s Houghton Library has acquired John Ashbery’s personal library of over 5,000 books. Curator Christina Davis called the collection, which includes everything from religious history to cookbooks, “a vital artery in his writing life” that “served as a kind of early and intimate internet, from which he drew ideas and felicitous bits of data on a regular basis.”
Following the success of Wired, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair’s respective paywalls, Condé Nast is planning to add metered paywalls to all its publications by the end of 2019, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Bill Clinton is working on a new book. The still-untitled project “sheds light on his post-presidential life” and will be published by Knopf Doubleday.
“One of crime fiction’s great strengths, to my mind, is the outsize metaphorical possibilities of, well, crime,” writes Adam Sternbergh in a reflection on the ethics of writing about violence. “Very few of us have ever murdered a neighbor in a fit of anger, or accidentally hit a drifter with our car, or accepted a murder contract and then buried the body deep in the woods in the dead of night. But most of us can relate to the notion of a shameful secret we hope the world will never uncover, or the feeling of having a fleeting impulse we don’t recognize and would rather not acknowledge.”
Nieman Lab talks to The Verge editor Nilay Patel about the website’s recent foray into fiction with its “Better Worlds” short story project.
The only full-time writers for the recently-resuscitated Gawker have left the website over their concerns about editorial director Carson Griffith, the Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani reports. Besides Griffith’s history of offensive tweets, writers Maya Kosoff and Anna Breslaw said that they were disturbed by their boss’s attitude toward race, gender, and diversity of possible writers for the site. “We’re disappointed it ended this way, but we can’t continue to work under someone who is antithetical to our sensibility and journalistic ethics,” Kosoff and Breslaw said in a statement, “or for an employer [CEO Bryan Goldberg] who refuses to listen to the women who work for him when it’s inconvenient.”
