Adelle Waldman Looking back on the year in fiction may not be the usual purview of an op-ed columnist, but the New York Times’s Ross Douthat appears to have launched the last literary feud of 2013 by doing so. Over the weekend, he used Adelle Waldman’s debut novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., to make a somewhat specious point about social conservativism, premarital sex, and the chaotic romantic lives of the book’s characters. In an interview with the New Republic, Waldman responds with admirable thanks-but-no-so-fast nuance. “Douthat makes the classic . . . conservative mistake,” writes Marc Tracy, “of
Beyoncé on tour in 2013 On her new track “Flawless,” Beyoncé samples Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author, most recently, of Americanah. The sample, taken from Adichie’s Ted talk, states: “We should all be feminists,” and makes up most of the song’s second verse. As the deluge of end-of-year best-of lists continues, it becomes easy to wonder if we should care about any of them. At the New Yorker, Elif Batuman helpfully explains, in convenient list form, that we should. Hate-reading our way through 2013: Obamacare is Obama’s Katrina, Iraq; Hipsturbia; Mr. 300 Sandwiches; etc. Gallerist reports on a
Robert Levinson, last seen in a video addressed to his family The New York Observer is ditching its iconic salmon tint and moving to plain white paper. If New York magazine’s decision to bail on its weekly publishing schedule isn’t enough to jolt the print-media landscape, come February, the Observer will lose its classic pink look as part of a larger effort, according to Capital New York, to transform the weekly newspaper’s format and give it a major image overhaul. After reporting a story for three years and delaying its publication three times (at the request of the US government),
Gerald and Sara Murphy on a beach in East Hampton, circa 1915 Thirteen news organizations, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and the Associated Press, have written a letter asking all parties to the conflict in Syria to stop kidnapping journalists on the job. More than thirty journalists have been abducted in 2013, seven in the past two months alone. Tonight at the 92nd Street Y, Jonathan Ames, Sheila Heti, and Lawrence Weschler will appear for an evening of reading and discussion celebrating The Best of McSweeney’s, an anthology covering the influential lit mag’s first
Elif Batuman More than 500 authors (including Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan) have signed a petition for the UN demanding an end to government and corporate surveillance of individuals online. n+1 just published No Regrets: Three Discussions, a collection of conversations about the perils and joys of reading while female, featuring Elif Batuman, Astra Taylor, Emily Witt, Sara Marcus, and many more. Editor Dayna Tortorici writes, “I knew that women speak to one another differently in rooms without men. Not better, not more honestly, not more or less intelligently—just differently, and in a way one doesn’t see portrayed
Claire Messud Vladimir Putin has unexpectedly closed RIA Novosti, a state news agency. According to agency insiders, the move “appear[s] to point toward a tightening of state control in the already heavily regulated media sector.” Claire Messud takes an interviewer to task for dwelling on the unlikable qualities of her latest protagonist. Harper Lee sues a museum in Alabama for trying to cash in on her legacy. Lauren Sandler tells women writers that if they want to be successful, they should stick to having just one child. At the New Yorker, Rachel Arons reviews the year in literary feuds.
David Remnick This year, the traditional Nobel Lecture in Literature has been replaced with a video of the 2013 prizewinner, Alice Munro, talking about her work. “Alice Munro: In Her Own Words” was shown at the Swedish Academy on Saturday, and is now available online. On Sunday, New Yorker editor David Remnick told a conference on digital media that he didn’t think New York magazine’s recent move to a bi-weekly was a good sign for the magazine. He was also politely skeptical about New York editor Adam Moss’s comment that he was “pretty excited” about the online opportunities that
Joan Didion At the New Yorker, South African novelist and Nobel–winner Nadine Gordimer remembers Nelson Mandela: “Not a figure carved in stone but a tall man, of flesh and blood, whose suffering had made him not vengeful but still more human.” The New York Times reports on a recent trip President Obama took to Politics and Prose bookstore in DC, where he bought nearly two dozen books. The Times reporter writes that the titles offer “a rare window into the president’s mind,” and notes, “unlike many of his predecessors, who devoured American history and biographies, Mr. Obama’s tastes lean
George Saunders 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
Eight cultural figures from the Dominican Republic have written an open letter condemning Junot Diaz, who is currently visiting the country to participate in talks about immigration, writing, and what it means to be a Dominican. The letter attacks the Pulitzer-winning Diaz for, among other things, “a scarce capacity for reflection and a disrespectful and mediocre use of the written word.”
Joyce Carol Oates and Mike Tyson in 1986 Beginning in March, New York magazine is going to come out every other week, becoming the latest publication to give up on weekly publication. As the Times points out, “The punishing economics of being a stand-alone weekly can be explained in one word: Newsweek.” Muckrack has a roundup of media responses. At the Awl, Choire Sicha argues that the magazine is still making money—some 3 million dollars a week, by his estimate. In the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates weighs in on Mike Tyson’s eager-to-please new autobiography: “To
Peter Kaplan Longtime New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan died on Friday at the age of 59. In a New Republic profile from last fall, Nathan Heller said of Kaplan, “Much of New York’s journalism world has come to regard Kaplan as a distant but endearing uncle—quirky, steeped in lore, and something of a daemon of the trade.” Longform has a nice selection of articles by and about Kaplan, including an oral history of the Kaplan era of the Observer, written when Kaplan left the paper in 2009. As the sale of the Bay Psalms book for $14.2 million last week reveals, the rare-book business is a lucrative one. So perhaps
Jynne Dilling Martin Laurie Penny explains what’s wrong about the Bad Sex Award, the annual British award granted to the worst erotic fiction: Not only is the award dated, it’s also priggish. At the TLS, John Ashbery, Michael Dirda, Marjorie Perloff, and others pick their favorite books of the year. We’ve been enjoying the recent reports and photographs from Jynne Dilling Martin, a poet, a publicist, and currently the 2013 Artist in Residence in Antarctica. Bookriot has compiled a list of the worst fictional families to spend Thanksgiving with. We were somewhat surprised not to find the Pollits, from
The US Justice Department has concluded that it will most likely not bring charges against Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange for publishing classified documents. According to the Washington Post, Assange published rather than leaked the classified documents, and therefore government lawyers cannot press charges “without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists.” A book of awesome heavy metal bands and their adorable feline friends? Yes, please! Yesterday, Sotheby’s auctioned one of the first English-language books published in America, The Whole Booke of Psalmes, for just under $14.2 million—a record for an auctioned book. The small translation of the Psalms, also known as the Bay
Maggie Nelson Graywolf Press has announced that it will |file://localhost/photo.php|publish Maggie Nelson’s next book|, The Argonauts, which is “a hybrid personal account and theoretical exploration of language and art, “good enough” mothering, queer identity, love, sex, and family.” Hybrid is a good word for Nelson: A poet, memoirist, and cultural critic, she is best known for her rangy study The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning and Bluets, a poetic and personal meditation on the color blue. (You can read her Bookforum Syllabus on Books about Color here.) The Argonauts was acquired by editor Ethan Nosowsky, who has recently edited
Literary detective J. Edgar Hoover The snazzy new Buenos Aires Review has launched with interviews and fiction and poetry by Juan Alvarez, Mario Bellatin, Vincent Toro, and Kenneth Goldsmith, among others. More and more people are getting to their news through Facebook. Between August and October, there was a 69 percent increase in traffic referrals from Facebook to partner sites via the BuzzFeed Network, which includes outlets like The Huffington Post, The Onion, and Slate. In other words, ”Facebook appears to have broadly shifted its algorithms and to create formidable new traffic streams that simply weren’t there just weeks earlier.”
The dapper Tom Wolfe The creative team behind the theatrical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home talks to the Times about the process of turning a cartoon into a musical, and the difficulties of presenting themes like suicide and coming out of the closet. The New York Public Library has bought 83-year-old writer Tom Wolfe’s archives for $2.15 million. The archive contains 190 boxes of Wolfe’s writing, including his research, drafts, outlines of novels, unpublished work, and more than 10,000 letters to literary friends such as Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and William F. Buckley. There are
James McBride, considered an “underdog” contestant, has won this years National Book Award for fiction. Other winners are George Packer (for nonfiction), Mary Szybist (poetry), and Cynthia Kadohata (young people’s literature). A week ago, Wyoming senatorial candidate Liz Cheney made news by publicly breaking with her sister over gay marriage (Liz opposes it; Mary Cheney is gay and in a same-sex marriage). In the wake of the controversy, Elaine Showalter took the opportunity to revisit Lynne Cheney’s frontier novel Sisters, which is “both a pulpy murder mystery, with cattle barons and homesteaders; and an astoundingly sympathetic treatment of Wyoming
William T. Vollmann Bloomberg News is cutting arts coverage, and very unfortunately, that includes books: The company let go of books editor and National Book Critics Circle president Laurie Muchnick on Monday. The New York Times talks with William T. Vollmann about The Book of Dolores, a creative account of Vollmann’s female alter-ego. Vollmann started cross-dressing seriously about five years ago, and he tells the Times that after a lifetime of dodging land mines and Afghan warlords, presenting himself as a woman introduced a series of new challenges: “A lot of friends who could always handle the prostitutes and the