Jay-Z We’re really into the newly launched Public Books, a “curated monthly review” on books and the arts put out by the Institute for Public Knowledge. If the site’s stylish design doesn’t do it for you, perhaps writing by Lawrence Weschler, Judith Butler, and Sudhir Venkatesh will. A Reddit “Ask Me Anything” interview gets to the bottom of the troubling economic logic of independent bookstores. “We’d clear 200 on a good day,” one bookseller wrote. Another lamented, “We’re at roughly $1,300 a day, and it’s still not profitable. The worst part is, since we’re independent and a specialty store,
Philip Roth biographer Blake Bailey Blake Bailey, the biographer whose previous books on John Cheever and Richard Yates have won him praise and awards, has found his next subject: Philip Roth. Bailey revealed this week that he signed a contract with Roth last June, and has been granted full access to the author’s archives and correspondence. The pair have already sat down for several “marathon” interview sessions, and Roth has agreed to give his new biographer his full cooperation. The book hasn’t been sold to a publisher yet, but there doesn’t appear to be much of a hurry: Bailey
To write an essay about Heart of Darkness, Geoff Dyer spent a night on a riverboat inspired by the Roi de Belges, the Congo-bound ship of Conrad’s novella. In her very first blog post for the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan defends the paper’s practice of fact-checking the news. Writing at the Paris Review Daily, Caleb Crain makes an elegant contribution to the ongoing debate about if and when critics should pull their punches. “How rude should a critic be?” he asks. Crain wonders if we can reframe the question: “How free should a critic be?” With the launch
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull author Richard Bach In No Easy Day, which will go on sale this week, former NAVY Seal Matt Bissonnette (writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen) offers a “firsthand account of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden.” According to Eric Schmitt in the New York Times, the book contradicts the Pentagon’s official description of the mission. “The new book’s account, if true,” writes Schmitt, “raises the question of whether Bin Laden posed a clear threat in his death throes.” “Dear Paris Review, I live in the deep south and was raised in a religious cult…” John
A scene from the Republican National Convention To commemorate the one year anniversary of the OWS movement on September 17, pick up the new issue of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy with essays by Jeremy Brecher, Gayatri Spivak, and David Graeber. The issue is available to download here, and fifteen thousand hard copies of the magazine will be distributed free of charge throughout New York City schools, bookstores, and streets over the coming months. Sam Sacks’s has written a short essay called “Against Acknowledgments” at the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog. Are acknowledgments “faux-modest self-promotion”? Scroll to the end
Mitt’s great-grandfather Miles P. Romney Confessions of a literary philanderer: Mark O’Connell wonders why, after years of being a faithful reader and always finishing what he started, he suddenly started abandoning books halfway through. The PEN American Center has declared the winners of this year’s PEN Awards. Robert K. Massie, Siddhartha Debb, James Gleick, Vanessa Veselka, and Susan Nussbaum all took away prize. A full list of winners is available here. The John Updike Society bought the author’s childhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania, for $180,000 on Monday, and has announced plans to turn it into a museum. Gothamist tries,
Here’s some recommended reading to get you up to speed on where Mitt Romney is coming from, and what his plans are. Pankaj Mishra tells the New York Times about the time more than thirty years ago when he heard about a local library preparing to sell back issues of the New York Review of Books as waste paper. “I convinced a friend of mine who was a student to pose as a paper recycler,” Mishra reflected. “He put in a very high bid and brought a whole bunch of stuff over in a rickshaw.” What’s it like spending
Just a day after Penguin Press announced that it would publish an account of the Osama bin Laden raid by an anonymous Navy SEAL, FOX News revealed the author’s identity. According to FOX, the author of No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden (coming out on Sept. 11, of course) is Matt Bissonnette, a thirty-six-year-old retired SEAL who lives in Alaska. The BBC is adapting Benjamin Black’s—i.e John Banville’s—detective novels into a three-part series of ninety-minute episodes. The episodes will star actor Gabriel Byrne as the protagonist, a detective named Quirke. The
Did you know Norman Mailer directed films? He did, four of them, and according to Sam Adams at Slate, the best thing to come out of Mailer’s relatively short-lived cinematic career was an epic fight scene between Mailer and Rip Torn that happens at the end of Maidstone. That 1970 movie was “shot over five days on several East Hampton estates and featuring a cast of dozens headed by—who else—Mailer himself, as art-house pornographer and potential presidential candidate Norman T. Kingsley.” While the rise of self-publishing has been a boon to writers flying under the radar of traditional publishing
David Mitchell To the chagrin of college bookstores, when students want to buy textbooks these days, they’re heading straight to Amazon. New studies show that actual course materials are accounting less and less for bookstore sales, dropping to only 54 percent last year. At the rate things are going, writes Mark Athitakis at the New Republic, books might fall by the wayside entirely. “The college store of 2015 is one part Target, one part ESPNU, one ever-shrinking part course materials: There are the requisite team-branded T-shirts, notebooks, and shot glasses, but also computer repair, dry cleaning, grab-and-go sushi, pop-up
A very young Gore Vidal In time for election season, Amazon has unveiled what they call an “election heat map,” which breaks down the country into “red” and “blue” states by taking the thirty-day averages of political book sales. While on the national level, red book sales are 12 points ahead of blue ones, political affinities switch when it comes to the candidates. According to Amazon, Obama’s biography The Audacity of Hope has outsold sold Romney’s No Apology by 64 percent over the past month. NASA has renamed a Mars landing site after sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury. The news
If you own a Mac, you might be pleased to learn that David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith live inside your thesaurus. This is because Macs utilize (“a puff-word” says DFW) the Oxford American Writers’ Thesaurus, which features notes by writers about words and their usage. For a full list of who contributed notes to certain words, check out Dave Madden’s blog. What’s the matter with Newsweek? That’s the question on, well, everybody’s mind after Tina Brown’s magazine ran a very problematic cover story by economic historian Niall Ferguson, author of titles such as The Ascent of Money, which
Irvine Welsh Last week was the week of bad book reviews. In The Guardian, J Robert Lennon reviewed Paul Auster’s Winter Journal (“…a terrible book—the kind of self-indulgent, ill-conceived, and poorly edited disaster that makes you doubt whether or not you could truly have liked the works that preceded it”). And in the New York Times Book Review, William Giraldi eviscerated Alix Ohlin’s Inside and Signs and Wonders in a review so scathing its prompted conversation about why the Times chose to run it. So what are the rules of writing good bad reviews? At Salon, Lennon offers some
Still from Cosmopolis Newly released FBI files on Sylvia Plath’s father, Otto, corroborate Plath’s pro-Nazi characterization of him in her 1958 poem, “Daddy” (“Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You— / Not God but a swastika”) by describing him as “pro-German” with a “morbid disposition.” Ira Glass talks to the New York Times Book Review about what he’s reading—which includes lots of books on the history of Minnesota for an upcoming This American Life episode. The Village Voice laid off five editorial staffers this week, and more cuts were made across the Village Voice media empire. Does this mean, as Rosie Gray
Good news: the East Village’s St. Mark’s Bookshop, which must leave its longtime location at 31 Third Avenue, has raised enough money online that it can now sign a new lease at a new location. “God is trying to kill me.” And: “I asked this guy to marry me, and it scared him off.” The Awl has printed a number of Paul Legault’s “translations” of Emily Dickinson poems, which were recently collected in Legault’s The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s). Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of serial child molestation early this summer, is apparently
New Yorkers: Come support the Russian punk band Pussy Riot by attending an event at the Ace Hotel in which Chloe Sevigny, Eileen Myles, Bookforum contributor Johanna Fateman and Mx Justin Vivian Bond read the band members’ courtroom statements. The three members of Pussy Riot were arrested in February on charges of “hooliganism” (which could land them up to seven years in prison) and have been held in custody ever since. Their sentence will be handed down on Friday. While the scenario is ripe for wordplay, the competitive Scrabble community found nothing funny about the scandal that erupted at
Renata Adler and Joan Didion in 1978 According to Random House’s website, the reissue of Renata Adler’s amazing novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark, which will be released by New York Review Books in February, will include an interview between Adler and the ultrasharp-eyed New York Times Style-section reporter Guy Trebay. “I think you’ll find her most unusual and most controversial:” Slate tracks down original footage of Ayn Rand on the Johnny Carson Show. Rumor has it that Apple may become the sponsor of the UK literary prize formerly known as the Orange Prize for Fiction. The prize, which recognizes
Members of the imprisoned Russian punk band Pussy Riot Longtime Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown died in Manhattan on Monday. “She was 90,” the New York Times reported, “though parts of her were considerably younger.” After getting her start as an ad copywriter, Gurley Brown, the author of the 1962 bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, edited Cosmo for more than three decades until her retirement in 1997. She is credited with giving the magazine its voice, and introducing candid (if airbrushed) conversations about sex to the American public, as well as coining the term “mouseburger.” To learn more
Republican nominee for vice president Paul Ryan has flip-floped on Ayn Rand. According to the LA Times, Ryan once credited Rand as a key inspiration, but now that he’s trying to win over a national audience, the young Republican is distancing himself from the godless, supremely self-interested writer. Quoth Ryan: “I reject her philosophy. . . . It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview.” (Meanwhile, in a feat of outlandish click-baiting, the New York Times has a blog post entitled “Paul Ryan, Black Panther?”) Ever wondered what