paper trail

Mar 7, 2011 @ 9:00:00 am

Victor Lavalle

Here’s a fascinating document that reveals the editorial changes made to David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published story, “Backbone” (a fragment from his forthcoming novel The Pale King), before appearing in the New Yorker last week. [Via the Millions]

Jon Cotner, one of the authors behind the excellent book, Ten Walks/Two Talks, has been covering the Armory Show for the Paris Review. In the process, he managed to ask Mayor Bloomberg what he thinks of Picasso’s blue period.

Letterpress, the printing technique beloved by chapbook and limited edition art book publishers, comes to the iPad. As Andrew Gorin writes at the Faster Times: “Trying to preserve the craft of letterpress printing by making it into an iPad app is. . . . so absurd that it just might work!”

At Slate, Jack Shafer writes about the newly-added editor credits at the end of New York Times Magazine feature stories: “Try complimenting an editor sometime about a good piece in his publication, and you're certain to get this eye-rolling response: ‘You shoulda seen it when it came in!’ For this reason alone, editors should be sentenced to perpetual anonymity.”

Tonight at the 92nd Street Y, novelists Victor Lavalle and Gary Shteyngart discuss their latest work.