Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt A.M. Holmes beat out Kate Atkinson, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, and a handful of other worthy contenders to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction yesterday at a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London. After receiving the £30,000 prize for her novel May We Be Forgiven, Holmes noted that this was “the first book award I’ve won.” This might also be the last time the award is given under this name: Beginning next year, the prize will be known as the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, thanks to a three-year sponsorship from the
Kenji Fujimoto, Kim Jong-Il’s personal chef In 1936, James Agee, accompanied by Walker Evans, took a commission from Fortune to write a long essay about sharecroppers in the rural South. The piece came in late and long—it ended up being around 30,000 words—and was never published, though it became the basis for Agee’s 1941 classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. After being lost for decades, the manuscript was discovered, and is being published this week in its entirety by Melville House. For more on the book as a literary and journalistic artifact, read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s masterful essay
The new sponsor of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. For the next three years, Baileys liquor will sponsor what used to be known as the Orange Prize. The British-based prize awards nearly $46,000 to the year’s best female fiction writer. This year’s prize will be announced on Monday, and though Hilary Mantel is rumored to be the favorite, she’s up against stiff competition: Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Kate Atkinson, and A.M. Holmes are also in the running. Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda died nearly forty years ago. His body was exhumed about two months ago, and yesterday, a Chilean judge
Protests in Turkey, from the ROAR Collective As anti-government protests rippled across Turkey, Elif Batuman went out into the streets to report on the occupation of a small park in the European neighborhood of Taksim by peaceful protesters. “This morning, forty thousand demonstrators are said to have crossed the Bosphorus Bridge from the Asian side of the city, to lend support in Taksim. Hundreds of backup police are reportedly being flown into Istanbul from all around the country… On my street, spirits seem to be high. Someone is playing ‘Bella, Ciao’ on a boom-box, and I can hear cheering
Thirteen-year-old Arvind Mahankali, a resident of New York, won the National Spelling Bee on Thursday for correctly spelling ‘knaidel’: a small mass of leavened dough. Don Share has been named editor of Poetry Magazine, a position he will take over from Christian Wiman. A published poet and senior editor of the magazine, Share will be the twelth editor in Poetry’s 101-year history. On Wednesday, Feminist Press and NYU’s Fales Library released The Riot Grrl Collection, an assemblage of ephemera from the feminist underground punk movement that took hold in the nineties. The book was launched with Johanna Fateman, Lisa
Still from Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt In a letter that recently went on sale in England, Rudyard Kipling admits that he may have borrowed sections of his story collection The Jungle Book from forgotten sources. Dated 1895 and addressed only to “madam,” Kipling writes, “it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen.” Dealer Andrusier Autographs is selling the Kipling letter for about $3,700. The city of London has begun its search for the first-ever Young Poet Laureate. Next year, the National Book Critics Circle will
Virginia Woolf, with T.S. Eliot. What Happened to Sophie Wilder, The Group, and The Best of Everything: The Awl rounds up the best recommended reading for newly minted college grads. Inspired by sites like Groupon and Gilt, Amazon and other online booksellers have started experimenting with flash sales for e-books, cutting prices by up to two-thirds for a day or two and featuring them on homepages. The strategy has been a major boon for publishers, and “at HarperCollins, executives said they have seen books designated as daily deals go from 11 copies sold in one day, to 11,000 copies
From the BBC comedy “Black Books,” about a dysfunctional bookstore. In 2014, Duke University Press will start publishing TSQ, the first non-medical journal dedicated to transgender issues. Who says you can’t be a writer while working a totally unrelated day job? At the Billfold, Cassie Alexander itemizes all the weird jobs she held (delivery food driver, aquarium temp) before her novel was published. Now that he’s left the helm of the New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus has found the time to start tweeting. After a series of mysterious high-level resignations, the Guardian asks what the hell is
Mass. Senator Elizabeth Warren Roughly a year after launching a redesigned website, the Los Angeles Review of Books is putting out its first print issue. Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker Prize for her short stories. (Read Rivka Galchen’s essay of Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary.) Pulitzer prize-winning New Yorker staffer Katherine Boo won the New York Public Library’s 2013 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism this week for Behind the Beautiful Forevers, her nonfiction account of life in a Mumbai slum. Former Bookforum editor Eric Banks has been appointed the new director of the New
At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Ian Crouch explores the idea that it is perfectly natural to forget many of the books one reads: “Books aren’t just about us, as readers. They belong perhaps mainly to the writer, who along with his narrator, is a thief. I wonder what writers forget about their own books?” Though it occupies a legal gray area, the whole idea behind fan fiction is that anybody can write it and readers don’t have to pay to read it. At least, that was how things worked until Wednesday, when Amazon unveiled Kindle Worlds: a
Lisa Pearson of Siglio Press. Most people know they they should read between the lines on book blurbs, and a recent, particularly egregious case of blurbing involving Washington Post fiction editor Ron Charles demonstrates why. Despite reviewing Martin Amis’s new novel, Lionel Asbo, so brutally that the review was a finalist for the Hatchet Job award, Charles was surprised to find that a Washington Post blurb ended up on the novel. Problem was, it wasn’t his: “on the new paperback—on the front cover, no less—appears this ringing endorsement from The Washington Post: ‘Amis is a force unto himself… There
Michelle Tea The New York Times Opinionator blog reads disgraced former BBC broadcaster Jimmy Savile’s biography in light of Lolita and the literary tradition of “female pedagogical pedophilia”—that is, books “fixated on the sexual awakening of schoolgirls.” Also in Lolita-land, at the NYRB, Mark Ford considers a spate of new Nabokov books, and re-reads the master’s classic with an eye to the question: Was Humbert Humbert Jewish? A University of Colorado librarian is being sued for millions by an academic publisher for writing a series of blog posts in which he characterized the company of engaging in suspect business
Under newly appointed editor Pamela Paul, a series of changes are being implemented at the New York Times Book Review. Among them, the e-book bestseller list will now be online only, book prices will no longer be included for any books, the magazine will have a “bloggier” look, and Paul has introduced a new column, “Open Book,” about readings and panels. The best thing we read all weekend was Salon staffer Andrew Leonard’s investigation into Wikipedia user Qworty, who is notorious for making thousands of “revenge edits” to the Wikipedia pages of famous writers. Following a tip, Leonard makes
Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart David. Belle and Sebastian founding member Stuart David is writing a memoir. In the All-Night Cafe is slated to be released next year by a UK imprint of Little, Brown, and it will cover the early years of the band: from when Davis met co-founder Stuart Murdoch in Glasgow through the release of their debut album Tigermilk (which includes the many literary lyrics, such as “The priest in the booth had a photographic memory for all he had heard / He took all of my sins and he wrote a pocket novel called The State
Ernest Hemingway The New Yorker debuts Strongbox, a secure document-submission system designed by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen that lets users anonymously submit documents to the magazine. Chris O’Shea quips that the service is “basically WikiLeaks for pretentious people.” Pirated versions of Fifty Shades of Gray have become a runaway hit in China. According to the Telegraph, the contraband editions are replicas of Taiwanese versions of the book, and are being printed en masse in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Despite having a cult following that extends back to eighties babies, Judy Blume is only now having one
Bret Easton Ellis Every page of David Wojnarowicz’s journals, covering the years 1971-1991, has been scanned and is available for online perusal at NYU’s Fales Library website. From a supremely unfun outward bound trip he took as a teenager (“I learned the first steps in rock climbing. The man who teaches it hit me on the top of the head for giving a wrong signal at the wrong time. I was really pissed off”), up through heartbreaking confessions near the end of his life (“My life is no longer filled with poetry and dreams. I can smell rust in
Witold Gombrowicz Witold Gombrowicz’s final book will be published in Polish at the end of this month under the title Kronos. The book, considered to be a companion piece to Gombrowicz’s Diary (which Eric Banks reviewed for Bookforum in 2012) covers his life in Poland, Argentina, and Berlin, and is rumored to be a mishmash of everything from his “erotic ventures” to lists of his “finances, travel, meetings, invitations and exchanges of gifts and letters.” At a press conference in Warsaw last week, Gombrowicz’s widow confirmed that this will be the last Gombrowicz manuscript to see publication. “This is
The National Theater in London is turning Katherine Boo’s prize-winning account of life in a Mumbai slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, into a stage production. For more on the book, read Jonathan Shainin’s review in Bookforum. Joe Muto, the so-called “Fox Mole” who blogged anonymously for Gawker about his time working as a producer on the O’Reilly Factor, pled guilty last weekend on charges of unlawful duplication of computer-related material and attempted criminal possession of computer-related material. Muto was fined $6,000, and ordered to serve ten days in jail and work 200 hours of community service. Since its publication
How Freedom would have been marketed had it been written by a woman. Fed up with the abundance of gender-specific cover designs, author Maureen Johnson took to Twitter this week to call on readers to “redesign covers by Literary Dudes. Imagine they have been reclassified as by and for women.” The results are pretty excellent. “I waited until my first book was published to learn the genre, and when Oprah announced ‘It’s literary fiction!’ just seconds after my pub date, I was overcome with joy.” At McSweeney’s, Jessica Francis Kane explains how to throw a “genre reveal party” for
Susan Bernofsky The hacker responsible for exposing the world to George Bush’s secret life as a painter has returned to terrorize Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell. Guccifer hacked into Bushnell’s email and Twitter accounts this week, then Tweeted a link to the first fifty pages of Bushnell’s forthcoming novel, Killing Monica. The incident also revealed how inept Bushnell and her publishers are with technology: “i know NOTHING about this but my husband thinks you can cancel a tweet but doesn’t know how to do it,” Bushnell’s publisher wrote in an email with the subject line “emergency!” Tin