Getrude Stein We might soon be paying taxes on books bought online if the Market Fairness Act—which “sailed” through the Senate on Monday with a 69-27 vote—has similar luck in the House. If the bill passes, it will go into effect in 2014. New York Magazine book critic Katherine Schulz explains why she finds The Great Gatsby “aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent.” Meanwhile, the New York Times tracks down real estate developers who have named their properties after the novel. Amanda Knox talks with the New York Times Book Review about her reading habits in prison: “Different
Niall Ferguson Dexter star Michael C. Hall is adapting Matthew Specktor’s novel American Dream Machine for a project that will eventually air on Showtime. While speaking at a conference last week, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson blamed our current financial crisis on the economic policies of Maynard Keynes, then noted that because Keynes was gay and did not want children, the economist lacked foresight and opted for short-term fixes over long-term solutions for economic problems. He has since apologized. Martin Amis moved to Brooklyn two years ago, and according to the London Evening Standard, he hasn’t been impressed with life
Library of Congress How many copies does a self-published author have to sell before their book qualifies as a bestseller? Famously reclusive author Harper Lee has filed suit against her literary agent for allegedly tricking the To Kill a Mockingbird author into signing over copyright on the novel. The deal took place five years ago, when Lee was in an assisted-living facility after having suffered a stroke. Lee claims that the agent took advantage of her at that time, and “engineered the transfer of Lee’s rights to secure himself ‘irrevocable’ interest in the income derived from To Kill A
Paul Thomas Anderson has reportedly started shooting his adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix, who Anderson worked with on The Master, and is set in an fictional California beach town towards the end of the 1960s. Less than a month after it was announced that John Freeman was resigning as the editor of Granta, the magazine has announced that it’s closing its New York office following the departure of three of its editors. How much does winning the Pulitzer affect book sales? It makes a difference—Adam Johnson went from selling 413 copies of The
Masha Gessen Moscow-based journalist Masha Gessen has signed on with Riverhead to write the first book about the Tsarnaev brothers, the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. According to the press release, the book will “explain who the brothers were, where they came from, what shaped them, and how they came to do what they appear to have done. From their displaced beginnings, as descendants of ethnic Chechens deported to Central Asia in the Stalin era, it will follow the brothers from strife-ridden Kyrgyzstan to war-torn Dagestan, and then, as new émigrés, to the looking-glass, utterly disorienting peace and
The reclusive Haruki Murakami New Yorkers! Join Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio and authors Jean-Euphèle Milcé, Ursula Krechel, and Mikhail Shishkin at the Public Theater at 6:30 tonight for a discussion of international crictism. The panel will discuss how the “style, attitude, and role of book criticism differs from country to country, and “how reviewers and book reviews shape-shift across borders, even as each country’s literary culture forms its own responses to political, technological, and aesthetic changes.” After offending much of Chicago with a recent roundup of Chicago-based books in the New York Times (the review concluded, “Chicago is not
The Beastie Boys in their younger days. A.A. Milne: venerated British author, Winnie the Pooh creator, and, according to newly released British military documents, “reluctant wartime propagandist.” What do Amanda Knox and Lawrence Wright have in common? Neither of their books will be published in England out of fear of the country’s rigorous libel laws. HarperCollins UK initially agreed to release the 25-year-old’s memoir, but recently backed out over concerns about a possible lawsuit and complications arising from Knox’s retrial in Italy over the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. The two surviving members of the Beastie Boys have
Cynthia Carr’s biography of David Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly, which Luc Sante reviewed for Bookforum, has been named as the finalist for The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, awarded by the Columbia Journalism School and The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, for a work of nonfiction that exemplifies “literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern.’’ Today marks the Paris Review’s first day in their new offices on 27th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea. “We’re across the street from Scores and about six doors west of Sleep No More,” editor Lorin Stein
Bookforum contributor Gary Indiana has organized a reading of the Marquise de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, which will take place on Saturday at 2:30 at Participant Gallery. The event will be hosted by novelist Patrick McGrath and will feature writers Lynne Tillman, Max Blagg, Dale Peck, Laurie Weeks, Rhonda Lieberman, Glenn O’Brien, and Richard Hell. Also at the gallery is Indiana’s latest exhibition of photographs and video work, Gristle Springs. There are American novelists and there are female American novelists—at least according to the gendered logic of Wikipedia. There are 3,837 novelists in the “American Novelist” category, and
Gary Shteyngart In a bid to direct the upcoming adaptation of the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Gray novels, director Gus Van Sant has shot a sex scene starring actor Alex Pettyfer as fictional billionaire Christian Grey. Focus Features and Universal Studios haven’t chosen a director yet, but Van Sant is hoping that the scene—which reportedly depicts the moment in which “the impressionable Anastasia Steele loses her virginity to Grey”—will prompt them to make a decision. Sloane Crosley—the author of two collections of personal essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number—has sold
John le Carré How does a book end up reviewed in both the New York Times Book Review and the newspaper’s Arts section, while the the book’s author is writing essays for the paper (and sometimes even being profiled for it)? New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan explains how Times fiefdoms divide their assignments: “The Times’s three staff book critics—Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin and Dwight Garner—make their own decisions about what to review. They do so without regard to, or knowledge of, what the editors of the Sunday Book Review, a separate entity, may have assigned or have
E.L. Konigsberg At The Millions, Ben Greenman explains how he often comes to understand his own book projects by discovering paintings that share the book’s spirits. In celebration of World Book Night, the publishing industry will give away 500,000 books including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and Willa Cather’s My Antonia at selected events across the country tonight. Instead of heading to the William Gaddis archives at Washington University to dig through the writer’s papers, Matthew Erickson decided to go hunting for Gaddis’s ‘realia’—”that archival category of physical, three-dimensional objects.” What he founded included a
New York independent bookstore Singularity Co. Was Amanda Knox a cunning murderer, a “mouse in a cat’s game,” or simply a young American who was ensnared by the labyrinthine Italian legal system? The new memoir by the American exchange student who was convicted of murdering her roommate while studying abroad in Italy is both a case for her innocence and a bildungsroman, writes Michiko Kakutani. Benjamin Schwarz, who has edited the Atlantic’s books and ideas section since 2000, has left the magazine, and been replaced by longtime Slate editor Ann Hulbert. At Poetry, Laura Sims introduces a feature in
Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan Last week, Gary Shteyngart announced to the world via Twitter that he had finally finished Middlemarch. “I DID IT!!! I FINISHED MIDDLEMARCH!!! All you haters out there said I couldn’t finish a book that long, but I did! HA HA HA! DOROTHEA 4EVER! P.S. Next I might read another long Britishy book like David Copperstein or whatever.” When interviewed about the accomplishment for the Daily News, Shteyngart told the paper, “I am never going to the Midlands.” The Digital Public Library of America—which “brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and
Meg Wolitzer Flavorwire has posted the first page of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge. It’s been a good week for Zadie Smith. In addition to making Granta’s list of the Best Young British Novelists and getting shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Smith was just shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize. David Mamet is going to self-publish his next book. For reasons nobody can explain, government officials in George Orwell’s birthplace of Bihar, India, are turning the writer’s former home into a monument—for Mahatma Ghandi. The house in Motihari City was damaged in an
Michael Pollan Just in time for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the LAT has rolled out an interactive map of literary Los Angeles. There’s stiff competition this year for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize). The shortlist includes Barbara Kingsolver, Kate Atkinson, AM Homes, Maria Semple, and Zadie Smith. The Boston police weren’t the only ones to consider the Boston Marathon as a possible terrorist target. In 2002, novelist writer Tom Lonergan published Heartbreak Hill: The Boston Marathon Thriller, which came with this description: “The trouble with most terrorists is they think
Adam Thirlwell Are American univesity departments allergic to political activists? Christopher Shea considers why anthropologist, author (The Democracy Project), and Occupy organizer David Graeber has been unable to get an academic job in the U.S. Ned Beauman, Zadie Smith, Adam Thirlwell, and David Szalay—as well as newcomers like Jenni Fagan, Xiaolu Guo, Joanna Kavenna and Ross Raisin—make Granta’s once-in-a-decade list of the Best Young British Novelists. Simon and Schuster is teaming up with the New York Public Library to launch an e-book lending program that will allow the library complete access to the publisher’s archive of e-books. The London
Yoko Ono Hundreds of Haruki Murakami fans waited overnight outside bookstores in Tokyo to get early copies of his latest novel, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. According to a review in Asahi Shimbun, the novel is about “a man who tries to overcome his sense of loss and isolation.” The Guardian elaborates: “at high school, protagonist Tsukuru Tazaki had four close friends whose names represented different colours. His did not, and at university he was rejected by his friends. Now 36, Tazaki is looking back on his empty, colourless life.” After visiting the Anne Frank Museum,
David Graeber Congratulations to the recipients of the 2013 Guggenheim fellowships, who include Colson Whitehead, Rachel Kushner, J.C. Hallman, Michael Lesy, Jennifer Homans, Ben Marcus, and Carlin Romano. To commemorate James Joyce, the Central Bank of Ireland has minted 10,000 special ten euro coins with the author’s face and a quote from Ulysses printed on them. A nice idea, but too bad they misquoted the book. At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Elaine Showalter traces the literature of American anxiety back to its late 19th-century origins. We’re a little jealous of the New York Times Magazine softball team’s jersey,