According to Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, the British newspaper has met with US and English government agencies more than one hundred times since it obtained (and started publishing) documents on surveillance from NSA contractor Edward Snowden. National security, he suggests, has come to threaten freedom of the press.
The online auction organized to help raise money for St. Marks Bookshop is now underway, and will run through December 15. Among the books for sale are The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (signed and “lightly annotated”), Anne Carson’s Antignoick (with a cover hand-drawn by the author), and an autographed first edition of Patti Smith’s Just Kids.
The New York Times has announced its picks for the ten best books of the year.
Laurie Penny recently took the “Bad Sex in Fiction Award” to task for being “dated” and “priggish.” But that didn’t stop readers from checking to find out this year’s winner: Manil Suri, for his novel The City of Devi. (The Gurardian has a brief excerpt.)
The Page-Turner blog has a chat with George Saunders at his Syracuse University office, where he was once a graduate student and now teaches in the MFA program. Saunders talks about how he begins writing: “There’s a mysterious element, a magical element, right? And it’s not reducible. A lot of the process is positioning yourself to receive the moment of magic when it deigns to come to you.”
Samuel R. Delany has been named the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, a lifetime achievement award for science fiction/fantasy authors. For more about Delany, check out the Paris Review’s Art of the Interview from the summer of 2011.
Tonight, NYU will celebrate the poetry of activist and writer Muriel Rukeyser. Participants include: Carol Gilligan, Kate Clinton, Jan Freeman, Gerald Stern, Jennifer Benka, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths.