Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim O’Brien has left his job as executive editor of the Huffington Post in order to work on historical fiction. O’Brien is now completing “the second installment of his five-book publishing deal.” Meanwhile, Arianna Huffington took the opportunity to remind staffers that HuffPost maintains a strict “no book writing” policy. “The policy is that anybody starting a new book must either leave employment or take a sabbatical,” a rep confirmed to New York Magazine. Crime writer Patricia Cornwall has won almost $51 million in a lawsuit against her former financial-management company. And speaking of crime and
David Markson HTMLGiant has found a way to complete a David Markson interview that didn’t quite make it into Bookforum. Haruki Murakami announced this week that he’ll be publishing a new novel in April, and fans are already beside themselves trying to guess what it will be about. The New York Daily News states (probably correctly) that it’s “safe to bet that there will be cats (that may or may not talk) and probably some awkward sex,” while another reader proposes that “it will contain ear porn, a lonely man, a teenage/under-age girl, the war in Manchuria [and] some
Brian Evenson Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic’s literary editor, is one of the winners of this year’s Dan David Prize, an award given to people who have made “contributions to humanity.” He will split the award’s $1 million with his fellow winner, the French philosopher Michel Serres. n+1 has posted a NSFW poem by Valery Nugatov titled “Love. Of Art.” Jonah Lehrer received $20,000 from the Knight Foundation to give a talk yesterday on plagiarism, a topic with which he is familiar. Slate’s Daniel Engber said the speech “broke nearly every rule of propriety and good taste,” and suggests
A novel of love in the age of critical theory. After listening to Rachel Kushner read at Bookforum’s New Museum event on Tuesday, Choire Sicha is exhorting his readers to pre-order copies of Kushner’s forthcoming novel, The Flamethrowers. (We second his advice.) The New York Times has reported that Time Warner is in early talks toshed most of its Time Inc. magazine titles—which include People, InStyle, and Real Simple. At Salon, Ben Nugent argues that novelists like Jeff Eugenides and Ben Lerner have found a new tactic for avoiding the saccharine language that’s often associated with writing about love.
Camilla Long’s scathing review of Rachel Cusk’s memoir Aftermath has won the annual “Hatchet Job of the Year” award. In little more than a thousand words, Long characterizes Cusk as “a brittle little dominatrix” and the book as a “vague literary blah, a needy, neurotic mandolin solo of reflections on child sacrifice and asides about drains.” Ouch. Given the rise in “showrooming” (the act of flipping through titles at a local bookstore before going home and buying the books on Amazon) booksellers are beginning to wonder whether charging customers simply to browse is as crazy as it sounds. In
Pablo Neruda Amid new suspicion that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda may have been poisoned following the coup that overthrew his friend, socialist leader Salvador Allende, a Chilean court has ordered that Neruda’s body be exhumed for a full autopsy. Neruda died twelve days after the 1973 coup, and the cause of death was stated as “extreme malnutrition”—even though Neruda weighed 220 pounds at the time. Tom Wolfe reportedly nabbed a $7 million advance for his last novel, Back to Blood, but so far, the book has only sold 62,000 copies (not including sales at Walmart and Sam’s Club). Choire
2013 Jaipur Literature Festival Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree, has written a thoughtful story about his friendship with Ghanaian president John Dramani Mahama—a friendship that in recent weeks has been scrutinized by the Ghanaian press. “President John Dramani has been fingered to be in bed with one Mr. Andrew Solomon, a gay lobbyist,” one paper has reported. Solomon points out that he has “neither the ability nor the inclination to meddle in foreign elections.” But he does express his hope that Mahama will “take a leadership role in the region on L.G.B.T. rights.” Macmillian has agreed
Washington, D.C.: The country’s most literate city—even with politicians. Helen Fielding, the godmother of chick lit, has written a new Bridget Jones novel, which will be published in November by Knopf. Title TBD. An Idaho state senator has introduced legislation would require high school students to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, “a novel touted by conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan and Rush Limbaugh.” Regan Arthur has been named the publisher and senior vice-presidentof Little, Brown, officially taking the position left open when Michael Pietsch became the CEO of Hachette in September of last year. Arthur, who has worked for
The Uffington White Horse New Yorkers, come to the Union Square Barnes and Noble tonight to hear Eileen Myles, Laurie Weeks, Barbara Browning, Vivien Goldman, Johanna Fateman, and Justin Vivian Bond read from the new Feminist Press book Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom. For more on l’affaire Pussy Riot, read Sara Marcus’s consideration of the book. Alan Hollinghurst talks to the blog Gilded Birds about the Uffington White Horse, a prehistoric hill figure in south eastern England and the “first work of art [he] can remember.” Colm Toibin is teaming up with German director Volker Schlöndorff to
Theodor Geisel and the Cat in the Hat. After more than two years and $16 million, Hachette Book Group, Penguin and Simon Schuster have finally debuted Bookish, a website designed to recommend books, share excerpts of new novels, and feature original essays. At The New Republic, a paean to Barnes Noble and its ability “to intuit the craving for a bit of bookish culture in the working- and middle-class suburbs” in the late ’80s and early ’90s: “It’s easy to forget now, but at the time suburban culture had few places that weren’t bars, bowling alleys, or the kind
Washington DC underground music icon Ian Svenonius (and one time “Sassiest Boy in America”) has written his second book, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group (Akashic Books), in which he holds seances to cull advice from dead superstars about how to navigate rock’s crooked path. Of course, it’s half a spoof, and allows Svenonius to sound off in his signature style about street gangs, drugs, nostalgia, and many other pressing issues for the aspiring musician—as well as preach his revolutionary anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian ideas. It’s agitprop with a sense of humor. In support of his latest book,
A Lynda Barry doodle Chris Kyle, the author of the bestseller American Sniper, was shot and killed at a shooting range in Texas on Saturday. Kyle’s book recounts his experiences as a Navy SEAL sharp-shooter in Iraq, where he was credited with more than 150 kills. The book also considers his brushes with depression after his return to the US. According to the Times, Kyle had brought his killer, a “troubled veteran,” to the shooting range, hoping that a day there might bring the struggling ex-soldier “some relief.” For more, read Jeff Stein’s review of Kyle’s “casually brutal memoir”
The Vladimir Nabokov Museum According to a list recently posted on Poynter, Charles “Chip” McGrath is among the staffers who are leaving the New York Times, which recently announced that it will be reducing staff by offering buyouts. McGrath edited the Times’s Sunday Book Review from 1994 until 2003, and has more recently been an arts reporter and reviewer for the paper, recently profiling authors such as Philip Roth and Andrew Solomon. New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman gets a good look at plans for the Norman Foster-led redesign of the New York Public Library’s flagship branch, and
James Joyce, sensation in China. Forget sock puppet reviews—writers are now actively soliciting bad Amazon reviews. After his novel Short Bus got an especially excoriating Amazon write-up, Brian Allen Carr decided that rather than getting angry, he’d run with the bad press. The author has announced his “Lone Star” contest, inviting readers to submit their own one-star reviews of his work. Reports that Islamist insurgents had destroyed thousands of 14th-, 15th-, and 16th-century manuscripts in the Malian city of Timbuktu may have been exaggerated. Although Timbuktu mayor Hallé Ousmane Cissé told the media earlier this week that roughly 40,000
Amy Poehler Amazon is about to start placing personalized advertisements on Kindles. After a gloom-and-doom report in the Wall Street Journal quoting Barnes Noble retail group CEO Mitchell Klipper as saying up to a third of all Barnes Noble stores could close within the next decade, the bookseller has issued a statement reassuring investors (and readers) that the brick-and-mortar model is still intact. The company is “fully committed to the retail concept,” and plans to test several new “prototype” stores this year. Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies wins the 2012 Costa “best book” prize with a unanimous vote.
Young Joan Didion. Joan Didion’s novel A Book of Common Prayer, the story of “two American women whose paths cross in a fictional Central American country on the verge of revolution,” is going to be adapted into the movie. The film will be directed by Campbell Scott—who also stars—and filming starts this Fall in Puerto Rico. In anticipation of his forthcoming book, The Democracy Project, anarchist David Graeber held a reddit “ask me anything”—and ended up getting nearly a thousand comments. For more, read Bookforum’s 2012 interview with Graeber. In his new book, Unknown Pleasures, Peter Hook reflects on
Betty Friedan Steven King has published an e-book essay on guns and the culture of gun violence in America. The issue has been a freighted one for King since 1997, when he published Rages, a novel about a high school student who holds his math class hostage at gunpoint. (The book’s tagline: “His twisted mind turned a quiet classroom into a dangerous world of terror.”) According to the New York Daily News, Rages “is seen to have been an inspiration for several school shootings up until King pulled the printing of the book in 1996, after a copy of
Jezebel laments the “hideous makeovers” of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day. The shortlist has been announced for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. Of the ten nominees, three write in English, and only three—Marilynne Robinson, Lydia Davis, and the French novelist Marie NDiaye—are women. Along with China’s Yan Lianke and Russia’s Vladimir Sorokin, who have both been censored in their home countries, the other nominees are UR Ananthamurthy (India), Aharon Appelfeld (Israel), Intizar Husain (Pakistan), Josip Novakovich (Canada) and Peter Stamm (Switzerland). The prize will be announced in London at the end of
Joseph Brodsky, with cat. The Chicago-based Poetry Foundation has appointed Robert Polito as its new president. Polito, currently the director of creative writing at the New School, is an accomplished editor (The Manny Farber Reader) and the author of many books, including the poetry collection Hollywood God and the Jim Thompson biography Savage Art, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Leanne Shapton, Sheila Heti, and Heidi Julavits have sold their book, Women in Clothes, which collects interviews, artwork, and essays by Miranda July, Zadie Smith, Rivka Galchen, Eileen Myles, and others. The book—which will “explore ideas about