Hari Kunzru peruses Richard Prince’s book collection.
Is getting profiled in the New Yorker the kiss of death for a director or actor’s career? “To put it mildly, there’s something of a New Yorker feature curse going around Hollywood these days,” Salon’s Alec Nevala-Lee writes, “since the beginning of 2010, the magazine has published eight features on artists best known for their work in film. Two are profiles of Clint Eastwood and Jane Fonda that are basically career retrospectives. Of the remaining six, five of their subjects… experienced significant professional reversals soon after the articles appeared.”
The Awl copyedits the last three issues of Copyeditors magazine, and catches ten typos.
Jonathan Lethem talks with NPR about the Talking Heads album “Fear of Music,” which is the topic of his new essay-length book.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has accepted $500 million in financing from Citigroup Global Markets to help the publisher restructure roughly $3.1 billion in debt. According to the Wall Street Journal, HMH has been hit by state budget cuts for K-12 textbooks, which make of the majority of company profits. Those sales have fallen by nearly fifty percent over the past four years.
The managing editor of the Missouri Review literary journal discusses how he got into his line of work, and considers the notion that “no one ever grows up wanting to be an editor.”