Thirteen news organizations, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and the Associated Press, have written a letter asking all parties to the conflict in Syria to stop kidnapping journalists on the job. More than thirty journalists have been abducted in 2013, seven in the past two months alone.
Tonight at the 92nd Street Y, Jonathan Ames, Sheila Heti, and Lawrence Weschler will appear for an evening of reading and discussion celebrating The Best of McSweeney’s, an anthology covering the influential lit mag’s first fifteen years.
MoMA is reissuing Calvin Tomkins’s classic book Living Well is the Best Revenge, about the lives of Sara and Gerald Murphy, American expats who were living in France in the 1920s, and served as the models for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s main characters in Tender is the Night. First in Paris and later in Antibes, the Murphys entertained Picasso, Hemingway, Cole Porter, and Fernand Léger, among others. Tomkins’s text, written for the New Yorker in 1962 and published as a book in 1974, is illustrated by more than seventy photographs from the Murphy’s family albums. Next month, MoMA is also reissuing Tomkins’s much-admired biography of Marcel Duchamp.
The Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa has won the annual Naguib Mahfouz medal. But he failed to secure an Egyptian visa to attend the ceremony last night, so he sent a letter instead: “For once I ask in shock about the purpose of writing, and confess that my illusions ended when I discovered that we are so weak, unable to help a child refugee in the camps and return him to the warmth of his house, or the body of a man shot by a sniper for passing wrongly in the wrong place at that wrong time, but, at the same time, it has removed from my eyes a haze I dared not confess before. We work in fragility because we produce beauty.”
Scholars at Yale University believe that an 1858 manuscript that it has acquired is the “first recovered memoir written in prison by an African-American.” In the book, The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, Austin Reed describes his experiences at a state prison in upstate New York.
Jason Segel has been cast to play the part of David Foster Wallace in the film The End of the Tour. The screenplay is based on transcripts of the novelist’s conversations, shortly after the publication of Infinite Jest, with Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky.