Philip Roth was awarded a Commander of the Legion of Honor award at the French embassy in New York last week for his contributions to literature and longstanding relationship with France. In a speech, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabuis attributed Roth’s “immense success in France” to his “art of storytelling, your irony and self-depreciation, which is not typically French.” The good news in a new National Endowment for the Arts survey is that more than half of all Americans read for pleasure in 2012; the bad news is that the number of people reading what the NEA calls “literature”—i.e.
The Collaboration, Ben Urwand’s new book about Hollywood’s “pact with Hitler,” was published last month and has already, unsurprisingly, stirred up all kinds of controversy. In a review of Urwand’s book,The New Yorker’s David Denby wondered why Harvard University Press had chosen to publish the book, citing what he deemed its many “omissions and blunders.” Denby also urged Harvard UP to “acknowledge these problems and correct them in a revised edition that is better informed, if less sensational.” In response to the review, Harvard UP issued a statement supporting Urwand’s work, and directing critics to “nearly 60 pages of notes and
In an essay for Page Turner, critic Lee Siegel reflects on the state of contemporary critical culture, the increasingly “social” (and positive) tone in reviewing, and why he’s done writing negative book reviews. One reason for the changing climate is, of course, the internet: “Authority is a slippery thing, and its nature is going through yet another permutation in literary life. There are plenty of young, gifted critics writing fiercely and argumentatively in relatively obscure Web publications. But they are keenly aware that, along with the target of their scrutiny, the source of their own authority is also an object
The decision of Goodreads to enforce a policy prohibiting users from commenting on authors’ behavior—only their books—has already generated seventy pages of comments and cries of censorship from angry users. Simon and Schuster has signed journalist Eleanor Randolph to write a “major biography” of outgoing mayor Bloomberg. According to the press release, the book will be about the “extraordinary career and legacy of Bloomberg, who revolutionized business reporting, who has been a powerful and innovative mayor of New York City for the last 12 years, and who has become a public figure of national significance.” Novelists Donald Antrim and
Columbus, Ohio publisher Two Dollar Radio is branching into the world of movies with their own “micro-budget film division,” Two Dollar Radio Movie Pictures. The division has already optioned two movies and plans to bring in more with money raised through crowdsourcing and incentives from authors like Grace Krilanovich, Scott McClanahan, Barbara Browning, and Joshua Mohr. Here’s a trailer for the project:
The Jane Austen ring. Kate Losse, author of The Boy Kings, has accused Dave Eggers of “rewriting” her book in his forthcoming novelThe Circle, which will be published in October. The Boy Kings is Losse’s nonfiction account of her time as one of the early employees of Facebook. The Circle is also about a young woman who moves up the ranks of a company that bears a strong resemblance to Google, and gradually becomes disenchanted with the company’s ethos of transparency and information gathering. Losse admits that she has not yet read Eggers’s novel. The Jane Austen’s House Museum has raised nearly $250,000 in
Russia’s cat librarian Finalists for the National Book Award in fiction have been announced. They are Pacific by Tom Drury, The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver, The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, Someone by Alice McDermott, Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon, Tenth of December by George Saunders, and Fools by Joan Silber. In lieu of teaching sex education in schools, Russian government officials are instructing children to look to literature for advice on love: “The best sex education
Marshall Berman The National Book Foundation has released their longlist for National Book Award in Nonfiction. The nominees are T.D. Allman’s Finding Florida, Gretel Ehrlich’s Face the Wave, Scott C. Johnson’s The Wolf and the Watchman, Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages, Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies, James Oakes’s Freedom National, George Packer’s The Unwinding, Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy, Terry Teachout’s Duke, and Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear. The finalists will be announced on Oct. 16, and the winner will be named on Nov. 20. At Vice, Marilynne Robinson talks with former student Thessaly La Force about her writing, religion, and
Terrible news from England this week: Former Smiths frontman Morrissey has cancelled his forthcoming autobiography with Penguin after a conflict with the publisher. According to a statement posted on a fan website: “Although Morrissey’s autobiography was set to be available throughout the UK on September 16th, a last-minute content disagreement between Penguin Books and Morrissey has caused the venture to collapse. No review copies were printed, and Morrissey is now in search of a new publisher.” At least we still have his music.
In the New York Times, author Joyce Maynard reflects on the years she spent with J.D. Salinger (having dropped out of college in order to live with him) and casts a cool eye on his relationships with with much younger women. What troubles Maynard most about how the public has reacted to news of Salinger’s affairs is “the quiet acceptance, apparently alive and well in our culture, of the notion that genius justifies cruel or abusive treatment of those who serve the artist and his art.” Five years after publishing The Family, a journalistic investigation into a “self-described invisible
Public intellectual, writer, Times Square expert, and longtime Dissent contributor Marshall Berman died in New York last week at the age of 72. Todd Gitlin summed up Berman, whose books include All That Is Solid Melts into Air, as a “master lyric-analytic Marxist, defiant chronicler of cities, activist, sage, dear friend.” Harper’s will never, ever post its content for free on the internet, says publisher John MacArthur in a three-page statement in the latest issue of the magazine. David Mitchell’s next book is “about an immortal being that gets reincarnated as different men and women.” In his book Into
People may be reading less individually, but at Flavorwire, Jason Diamond claims that we’re in a “golden age of online book clubs.” The 2009 publication of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland seems to have struck a chord: This fall will see the release of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Lowland, Stephen King’s Joyland, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Sisterland, Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland, Christopher Steward’s Jungleland, and Amy Sohn’s Motherland. And what’s with the overuse of “land” in contemporary book titles? “‘Land’ is the new ‘Nation,’ a modifier that hints at larger zeitgeisty themes while also intriguing the reader,” Amy Sohn tells the New York Times. In this
How has Catcher in the Rye been received in Russia? “First introduced to readers during Khrushchev’s thaw, Salinger’s novel became an instant sensation among Soviet readers in the nineteen-sixties, and it has remained a classic. The Party authorized the novel’s translation believing that it exposed the rotting core of American capitalism, but Soviet readers were more likely to see the novel in broader terms, as a psychologically nuanced and universally appealing portrait of a misfit who rebels against the pieties of a conformist society.” How do betting houses successfully pick who will win big book awards? By focusing on
Jimmy Carter The shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize has been announced. The nominees are NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, Jim Crace’s Harvest, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, and Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary. The winner of the $80,000 prize will be announced in London on October 15. The New York Times reports that former president Jimmy Carter is currently shopping around a book about the unfair treatment of women around the world and “the use of religious texts to justify discrimination.” In the proposal, which
The FBI file on Charles Bukowski reveals that the life of the self-described “dirty old man” and poet laureate of American barflies wasn’t quite as risque as his work might have suggested. Last week, Open Culture published pages of the government’s 1968 Bukowski file on bukowski.com, and “it seems that the Feds had a hard time getting any dirt on the poet; some of the entries into his file primarily involve his neighbors admitting that they didn’t know much about the reserved but ribald postal worker … and that he was a quiet man who seldom had visitors.”
A new UK survey finds that 62 percent of the British public has lied about reading classic novels, with George Orwell’s 1984 being the novel that most Britons have falsely claimed to have read, followed by War and Peace and Great Expectations. According to the Daily Mail, “women are more likely than men to bluff that they are well read when they have often only seen literary classics dramatised in films or on TV.” Matthew Shear, the publisher of St. Martin’s Press, died of complications arising from lung cancer last week at his home in Manhattan. He was 57. Harper
The new Bookforum is among us. Available online: Ed Park’s review of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel of Uptown Manhattan and the Deep Web, and Mary Gaitskill’s meditation on what’s truly disturbing about Gone Girl. In the olden days, public intellectuals would hold court in magazines and newspapers, and scholars would publish in scholarly journals and with university presses. Today, Jill Lepore notes in the Chronicle of Higher Education,”‘writing for the public’ is … a fairly meaningless thing to say. Everyone who tweets ‘writes for the public.’ Lectures are posted online. So are papers. Most of what academics produce can