The New York Times searches its soul over whether its Amazon story was fair. Meanwhile, the Onion, not for the first time, struggles to preserve the distinction between its satire and straight reporting.
Mostly ignoring the chic starriness that clings to Joan Didion in so much of the coverage of her, Louis Menand traces the significant change in Didion’s work and worldview through the decades. Plus there’s a nice nod to the art of the disclaimer: “(Full disclosure: you are reading this piece in The New Yorker).”
Who’d be Gawker’s lawyer? Only the brave.
The Center for Fiction announced the shortlist for its $10,000 First Novel Prize—those in the running include Ben Metcalf and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Apparently a painstakingly simplified version of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (it took the adapter well over a decade) has been threatening to overtake E. L. James on the Spanish best-seller list. One sensitive professor told reporters it was “a crime against literature”: “I ask the booksellers in Madrid and they tell me no one buys Cervantes's original novel anymore because readers prefer the 'light' version.”
Tonight at Book Culture, Benjamin Moser launches Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories.
