After yesterday’s announcement of the Booker Prize shortlist, the bookies’ favorite is Hanya Yanagihara’s harrowing A Little Life (reviewed in Bookforum’s summer issue). It’s an interesting list: Marilynne Robinson didn’t make it, and Tom McCarthy is the only previously shortlisted writer who did; the others are Marlon James, Chigozie Obioma, Sunjeev Sahota, and Anne Tyler.
Trouble at the L.A. Times: The owner, Tribune Publishing, after firing the paper’s publisher last week over a host of internal disputes, apparently plans to save around $10 million in editorial expenses, cutting some eighty newsroom jobs.
Mary Karr has just published her tough-love advice for memoirists, and appeared on Fresh Air to mark the occasion (though if audio is not enough, you can also watch Karr—and Lena Dunham, and Gary Shteyngart—talking on the subject). Among other things, she debunks the notion that David Foster Wallace disliked his own fame: “I had to talk David out of doing a Gap commercial at one point because I said, ‘Would Cormac McCarthy do it? Would Toni Morrison do it?’”
Writers should cheat more (turns out only suckers follow the submission guidelines)...
… and so should readers (Tilly Minute, of the New Yorker Minute newsletter, which goes out Wednesday nights, has “recently learned many people get the print edition earlier than Thursday; I apologize to them for having to let the magazine sit for a few days before knowing what they need to read.”).
Hal Foster will be reading tonight at the Kitchen to launch his book Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, which looks at Western art of the last twenty-five years and its relationship to “the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.” More than three thousand people claim to be attending on Facebook, though, so you may want to be early, or resign yourself to catching the livestream instead.
