Texas senator and Tea Partier Ted Cruz has sold a book to HarperCollins for close to $1.5 million. Cruz has yet to write the book, but apparently it will be “part memoir and part Cruz’s view of how to get Washington to work again as well as his vision of the future for the country.” At Salon, Alex Pareene explains “why liberals should cheer Cruz’s absurd book deal.”
If you’re in New York tonight, we recommend going to what promises to be a delightful discussion between Mark Ford and John Ashbery.
A story Beckett wrote in 1933, “Echo’s Bones,” will be released this month for the first time by Britain’s Faber & Faber. “Echo’s Bones” was slated to be included in Beckett’s 1934 collection, More Pricks Than Kicks, but the publisher found it “a nightmare” and held it back: “People will shudder and be puzzled and confused,” he insisted, “and they won’t be keen on analyzing the shudder.” To a friend, Beckett wrote that the rejection of the story, “into which I put all I knew and plenty that I was better still aware of,” had profoundly discouraged him. Karen Joy Fowler has won the Pen/Faulkner award for her novel about a family who adopts a chimpanzee, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
Buzzfeed kicks off its new section, “Ideas,” with a note from section editor Ayesha Siddiqi. Ideas is “for a culture no longer invested in diluting topics for the comfort, and from the perspective, of the few,” she explains: “We’re here to trigger the empathies we have the least practice in. We’re here to offer essays and articles that don’t mistake distance for objectivity. We’re here to laugh at the fear of a PC police.”
The New Inquiry launches its April issue, “Money,” which includes pieces on paid surrogates, Amazon’s MTurk service, and alternative currencies.