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,
Max Brod and Franz Kafka. | SWR/SAGI BORNSTEIN/DR The City of New York has settled with Occupy Wall Street over a lawsuit resulting from the destruction of an OWS library during a police raid last year. According to papers filed by the OWS Library Working Group, the city seized 3,600 books last November, and only returned 1,003 of them. The city has agreed to pay the movement $47,000, and will cover $186,350 in attorney fees. Todd Field, director of Little Children and In the Bedroom, is adapting Jess Walter’s latest novel, Beautiful Ruins. Deborah Copaken Kogan contributes a brave
Margaret Thatcher, the best thing to happen to publishing in the UK since Harry Potter. Pamela Paul, a features editor at the New York Times Book Review, will replace Sam Tanenhaus as editor of that publication. Tanenhaus, who took over the magazine back in 2004, will now be a writer-at-large for the New York Times, with a focus on “the ideological and historical roots–and emerging character — of today’s roiling political movements.” Haruki Murakami, Karen Russell, Arthur Phillips, Michel Houellebecq and Julie Otsuka are among the writers on the shortlist for the $130,000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which will
Pablo Neruda The New York Times profiles Mellow Pages, a DIY bookstore in far-flung Brooklyn that stocks around 1,300 books by small presses and mostly unknown writers. The latest issue of New York Magazine takes stock of the state of the media with a special section dedicated to its past, present and future. Mark Danner interviews NYRB founder Bob Silvers on the magazine’s fifty-year history; Frank Rich assesses the declining profit margins of print newspapers, and Andrew Rice considers the charge that BuzzFeed is nothing more than “a super-big ad tech company with a journalism veneer.” It’s a big
Google Glass: soon to be worn by Gary Shteyngart. Gary Shteyngart has been invited to join a special pilot program for Google Glass—the Google-designed glasses with a computer built into them. Shteyngart was selected after tweeting that the glasses would help him “dream up of new ideas for the TV adaptation of my novel Super Sad True Love Story.” After becoming one of the chosen few, the author told Buzzfeed that he couldn’t “resist becoming a cyborg anymore—it’s clear that all paths lead to me becoming more machine than man. Which is fine, because I never really liked me
Roger Ebert Hillary Clinton has signed a deal with Simon and Schuster to write a book (her third) about “key decisions and experiences from her time as Secretary of State.” The book, which as of yet does not have a title, is slated to come out in 2014—just around the time that Clinton is rumored to announce a possible run for her boss’s job. Legendary Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert passed away on Thursday at the age of 70. In addition to his incredible body of criticism (much of which is available at the Sun-Times archive), Ebert will
For your reading pleasure, Longform has rounded up all the finalists for the 2013 National Magazine Awards in the categories of Features, Reporting, Public Interest, and Essays and Criticism. At the New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton writes about the intellectual underpinnings of the Digital Public Library of America: “a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world.” The Library is set to launch on April 18. In anticipation of Junot Diaz’s upcoming reading at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, organizers have commissioned a
Paula Fox The Paris Review is running a series of essays paying homage to Paula Fox, who will be honored at the journal’s annual Revel with the Hadada Prize. The first essay comes from Tom Bissell, who got Fox’s classic novel Desperate Characters back into print while still an editorial assistant at W.W. Norton. According to Bissell, the novel (a tale of cat bites, gentrification, and marital dissintigration set in brownstone Brooklyn) “cuts across generations and aesthetic tastes like no other modern novel I know. Postmodernists love it. I love it. Hipsters love it. Academics love it. Realists love
Margaret Atwood It’s that time of year again: the nominees for the National Magazine Awards (unfortunately known as the ASMEs) have been announced. While there are too many worthy contenders to name here, we’d like to congratulate Bookforum contributor Daphne Merkin for scoring a nominations in the “columns and commentary” category for her writing in Elle magazine. More awards news: We now know who will be deciding the next National Book Awards. For $1,400 a pop, exceptionally dedicated fans of Margaret Atwood can join the Canadian author on a seven-day cruise as she promotes her forthcoming novel MaddAdam. At
Andrew Motion How are Goodreads users reacting to news of the forthcoming takeover by Amazon? Not well, says Rob Spillman at Salon: “On the Goodreads Facebook page, sentiment about the acquisition is running 10-to-one against it. Many members felt proprietary about the site and posted with surprising venom that they felt betrayed and were going to delete their accounts. A typical response: ‘You screwed us over. Take your money and run. You know the site you worked so hard on’ will be corrupted by Amazon.” At the Awl, Jim Behrle has some practical advice for aspiring writers: “The Creative
Goodreads, now brought to you by Amazon. Citing “a crisis of conscience” after the death of internet activist Aaron Swartz, the the editor-in-chief and the entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration have announced their resignation from the publication. The Journal had been working with owner Taylor Francis towards an agreement which would have removed the paywall surrounding articles, but negotiations ultimately failed, and the final contract would have required contributors to pay $2,995 for each open-access article. In a statement to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the outgoing EIC remarked, “the math just didn’t add up.”
Non-Nobel Prize winner Junot Diaz A slip of the tongue on the Steven Colbert show this week led the talk show host to mistakenly award Junot Diaz the Nobel Prize—which may in fact be the only prize left that Diaz hasn’t won. It’s widely speculated that Proust was gay, and the recent publication of his first-ever poem—a piece called “Pederasty,” penned when he was only 17—only corroborates the theory. At Hazlitt, Sarah Nicole Prickett has an inspired piece about “the gentle art of making enemies” with a focus on Renata Adler and Azealia Banks. Is literary fiction a standalone
Shades of gray are single-handedly keeping Random House in the black. Tune in to Connecticut’s WNPR station at 1pm today to hear Dushko Petrovich talk to Victor Navasky about the art of making magazines. But before you do, read Petrovich’s Bookforum review of Navasky’s anthology. Random House posted record profits last year thanks to the staggering success of the Fifty Shades trilogy. The publisher, which will soon merge with Penguin, made nearly $420 million last year—a 75 percent increase from the year before. According to The Guardian, “Fifty Shades accounted for almost one in ten of the 750m books
The New York Public Library’s Bryant Park Reading Room. The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center has announced the writers, novelists and historians who will be in residence as fellows for 2013-2014. Congrats to novelists Tea Obreht, Rajesh Parameswaran, Paul La Farge, and Damion Searls, and to journalists Arthur Lubow, Elizabeth Rubin, Elif Batuman and David Grann, among others. Former New Republic senior editor Tim Noah speaks out about his recent firing and his former boss, TNR publisher and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who he suspects might be a “young man with more money than sense.” Over 100,000 Britons
Barnes and Noble are going to radically reduce the number of Simon and Schuster titles they stock after a conflict between the two companies. According to the New York Times, the situation arose after Simon and Schuster rejected the terms of a new contract proposed by Barnes and Noble which would have allowed the bookseller to charge the publisher more to stock their books in exchange. The Times also notes that this is the first time that Barnes and Noble “has used the sale of books as a negotiating tool.” The cover has been revealed for Donna Tartt’s forthcoming
A graph depicting the rise and fall of mood words in twentieth century fiction After a short illness, literary legend Chinua Achebe passed away on Friday at the age of 82. Achebe was the author of more than twenty books, including the classic Things Fall Apart, which is the most read African novel in history, and most recently, his 2012 memior There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra. Achebe was driven out of his native Nigeria during the country’s civil war in the sixties, and spent much of his life writing and teaching in the United States.
Benjamin Alire Saenz Benjamin Alire Saenz’s short story collection Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club has won the $15,000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A notable detail from Boris Kachka’s account of crashing a cocktail party with Renata Adler: “I think I’ve written this other novel, it seems,” she says. “It’s in the mail.” “In the light of history it’s clear that however great Truman Capote’s literary gifts, his promotional genius surpassed them”: Ben Yagoda fact-checks the New Yorker’s fact-checking for In Cold Blood (which was originally published in the magazine as a four-part serial) and finds that