Everyone is enjoying the delicious irony of Amazon’s new show, Good Girls Revolt, being “fundamentally premised on the championing of employees’ rights.”
Fear and loathing, meanwhile, greets the judge who recently decided to let Hulk Hogan dig through Gawker’s e-mail, a move that is, in the words of the New York Observer’s editors, “scaring the hell out of lots of publishers.”
Veteran editor John Freeman offers a somewhat breathless account (and who can blame him?) of his experience publishing Lydia Davis.
In the New York Times, a brief interview with the formidable Roberto Calasso, whose memoir, The Art of the Publisher, is coming out in English.
And, from Meghan Daum’s reprinted essay collection, My Misspent Youth, a different view of publishing, from the bottom.
If you missed this rereading of John Williams’s Stoner and its portrayal of academia from a lecturer at Harvard, it’s worth a look: “The gap between our academic climate and the world Williams describes is what gives Stoner its peculiar poignancy. Both the highpoints and crises of Stoner’s teaching career seem nearly unimaginable from our current vantage point. Consider Stoner’s practice of meeting with students in his off-hours, in his study at home or in his office at the university. Today, as U.S. News reported, an equally dedicated adjunct might meet with students in a parking lot, where she’ll pull relevant papers and books from the trunk of her car (few adjuncts have offices at the institutions where they teach).”
Tomorrow night, Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio will be hosting a discussion of humor in fiction and the darker explorations it can make possible.
