paper trail

Nick Tosches, 1949-2019

Nick Tosches

Music writer Nick Tosches has died at age sixty-nine. The critic was associated with Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer, who were dubbed the “noise boys.” Tosches got his start writing about rock 'n' roll for Creem, Rolling Stone, and other magazines, and went on to write books including Country (1977), Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (1982), Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll (1984), and the Dean Martin bio Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992).

HarperOne has purchased the world rights to Tiger Woods’s memoir, Back.

Alexandra Alter offers a look at the first public exhibition of J.D. Salinger’s archives, now up at the New York Public Library. Among the many items on display: an addendum for an affidavit from Salinger’s lawsuit against Steven Kunes, a con artist who attempted to sell a fake interview with the author, who was notoriously private, to People magazine. According to Matt Salinger, the writer’s son, “It was important to me that I not only present the warm and fuzzy stuff. This shows his very principled, prickly nature. He could be prickly as hell with people, professionally. He was fiercely protective of his work. Having some letters like that was important, to have that balance.”

Filmmaker Bela Tarr reflects on his seven-hour-plus adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s novel Sátántangó, which was released twenty-five years ago. “I'm just a big fucking maniac who believes in people," Tarr says.

The Library of America remembers Harold Bloom, who died last week, with a tribute and a series of appreciations from writers such as Peter Cole, David Bromwich, and Helen Vendler. As Joshua Cohen writes: “I was and remain utterly terrified by the urgency and, especially, by the gravity of Bloom’s passion, which made a mission out of literature and could only turn the professionals and clock-punchers, the snobs and social-readers, into enemies . . . often against their will and better judgment.”