Tonight at the Lincoln Center Film Society, Tom McCarthy will celebrate the launch of his new novel, Satin Island, by introducing a double feature: Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Johan Grimonprez’s 1997 essay film on the history of airplane hijackings, and Antony Balch and William S. Burroughs’s seminal 1963 collage/film Towers Open Fire.
The finished version of Kim Gordon’s memoir Girl in a Band, which went on sale yesterday, has deleted a comment about the musician Lana del Ray that appeared in the pre-publication galleys: “If she really truly believes it’s beautiful when young musicians go out on a hot flame of drugs and depression, why doesn’t she just off herself?”
This week, Bill O’Reilly continues to ward off attacks on his credibility. On Monday night, he threatened a New York Times reporter as she was finishing a story about a recent story in Mother Jones, which states that O’Reilly has lied about being in the “war zone” of the Faulkands War. (According to the Huffington Post, O’Reilly has a history of threatening journalists.) Meanwhile, another journalists has accused O’Reilly of fabrications. In his 2012 book Killing Kennedy, Bill O’Reilly claims to have heard a CIA asset who had ties to the Kennedys and Oswalds shoot himself. But according to author and former Washington Post editor Jefferson Morley, this story is entirely made up.
The 2015 Windham Campbell Prizes were announced yesterday morning. The winners include Geoff Dyer, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Edmund De Waal, Teju Cole, Helon Habila, and Ivan Vladislavic.
In London, someone is distributing hand-drawn copies of a single four-year-old edition of The Guardian. The type in the stories isn’t quite legible, but everything else has been faithfully reproduced. The Guardian says it isn’t responsible.
Amazon will release the first ten titles in its crowdsourced publishing platform, Kindle Scout, on March 3. Writers get a five-year renewable contract, a $1,500 advance, and 50 percent royalties on e-book sales. Twenty-one titles have been selected in total.