• Kevin Bacon
    April 20, 2016

    Kevin Bacon set to star in "I Love Dick"

    A few readers of Chris Kraus’s groundbreaking epistolary novel I Love Dick have expressed concern that publishing it was unfair to cultural critic Dick Hebdige, her sometime crush and the book’s unwilling subject. It should come as some comfort to those people (and, who knows, perhaps even to Hebdige himself) that the delightful Kevin Bacon is likely to play Dick in Jill Soloway’s upcoming TV version.

    Bill Cosby’s lawyers are pressing New York magazine to release all unpublished material from the interviews for its cover story on his many accusers.

    In the latest issue of Harper’s, Elaine

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  • Kathryn Schulz
    April 19, 2016

    The Pulitzers

    This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday, including Kathryn Schulz, who’s being rewarded one more time for scaring us more than any magazine writer should.

    Hilary Mantel describes her days writing fiction, which “makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. . . . A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. At the end, I see what the plan was.”

    Lenny, Lena Dunham’s new Random House imprint, is publishing Sour Heart, the first story collection by poet and essayist Jenny Zhang. (“The good thing about having

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  • Mary Beard
    April 18, 2016

    Jonathan Franzen to edit "The Best American Essays"

    Jonathan Franzen is editing the next edition of The Best American Essays. The contents haven’t been revealed yet, but rumor has it that Alexander Chee’s “Girl” is one of the selections.

    The New York Times style section features a profile of the classics scholar Mary Beard, the author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award) and Laughter in Ancient Rome. Laughter, it turns out, plays a significant role in the piece. A. A. Gill once said that Beard, who appears regularly on TV in the UK, was more fit for the British reality-TV show The

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  • Yan Lianke
    April 15, 2016

    Man Booker International shortlist includes Ferrante

    The New Republic’s editor in chief Gabriel Snyder is leaving the magazine after seventeen months in charge. His departure comes on the heels of the recent sale of the publication to Win McCormack. “We published some damn fine work, sometimes under difficult circumstances,” Snyder said in a memo, with admirable understatement.

    The shortlist is out for this year’s Man Booker International Prize, and contenders include Orhan Pamuk, Yan Lianke, and the elusive Elena Ferrante.

    The New York Times is investing $50 million in a new team called NYT Global, which hopes to dramatically expand the

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  • Nesrine Malik
    April 14, 2016

    Reading the comments

    The Guardian has surveyed the seventy million comments left on their website since 2006, looking for patterns in abusive commenting and trolling. They found that the ten most abused writers were eight women and two black men (despite the fact most of the site’s writers are white men). The article includes videos of the journalists (including Jessica Valenti, Nesrine Malik, and Steven Thrasher) discussing the effect of the abuse, as well as interactive data breaking down the survey, and a feature where readers can play moderator, deciding if various comments about feminists should be blocked.

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  • Marlon James
    April 13, 2016

    Brian Wilson writes his memoirs

    The Beach Boys’ resident genius Brian Wilson will be publishing a memoir in October. I Am Brian Wilson, co-written with Ben Greenman, covers the songwriter’s life and career and will be released shortly after Wilson’s masterwork, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. In an excerpt from the book on Pitchfork, Wilson writes, “when I think back across my own life, there are so many things that are painful. Sometimes I don’t like discussing them. Sometimes I don’t even like remembering them. But as I get older, the shape of that pain has changed.”

    The New York Observer

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  • Maggie Nelson
    April 12, 2016

    The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist

    This week’s New Yorker includes Hilton Als’s moving profile of Maggie Nelson. Als proposes one answer to the question of why Nelson’s latest book, The Argonauts, about her experiences in queer family-making with her fluidly-gendered partner Harry Dodge, has resonated so widely: “What . . . fans responded to most viscerally, perhaps, was the fact that it’s a book about becoming, both mentally and physically—about what it takes to shape a self, in all its completeness and disarray.” Nelson’s 2007 memoir The Red Parts, about the trial of a man accused in the unsolved 1969 murder of her aunt, was

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  • Jelani Cobb
    April 11, 2016

    More anger over Gay Talese

    Last week, Gay Talese faced much criticism after saying at a Boston conference that he had not been influenced by any women writers of his generation. At Slate, Isaac Chotiner points out that Talese’s recent article in the New Yorker, about a hotel owner in Colorado who spied on his guests, reveals “an even darker side” of the author. The article is, Chotiner states, “a failure of journalistic ethics and a revealing window into Talese’s character,” not least because Talese, in writing the piece, joined the hotel owner and spied on people himself. Meanwhile, Washington Post editor Marisa Bellack

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  • Philip Roth
    April 08, 2016

    The trials of the Times

    In a rare move for him, the New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has harshly criticized a story the paper ran on Wednesday, which detailed Gay Talese’s online trials after he made some unfortunate remarks about women journalists at a conference. Baquet takes issue with a Talese quote in the article in which he used the word “duplicitous” to describe Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Times journalist to whom Talese had reportedly made another insensitive comment. Baquet writes, “Yesterday’s story was flawed and Nikole was treated unfairly. But this incident is larger than the exchange between her

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  • Susan Howe
    April 07, 2016

    The journalist and the poet

    Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the OJ Simpson murder trial, is back in the spotlight, as the FX television series rehashes the case, including the withering comments Clark endured about her appearance. Now a crime novelist, Clark says she always envied the way authors work, “because they can be very successful, but no one knows what they look like. You don't get recognized. It's a pretty cool way to work.”

    Tonight at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, Ben Lerner talks with Susan Howe.

    On April 18th, the Martha Graham Dance Company will stage a live marathon reading of Graham’s 1991 memoir,

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  • Chris Bachelder
    April 06, 2016

    Lena Dunham's book imprint; the dangers of guest Tweeting

    Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner are starting an imprint at Random House called Lenny, which will publish both fiction and nonfiction.

    “Jackie,” the anonymous subject of the retracted University of Virginia rape story in Rolling Stone, is being compelled to testify in a defamation suit against the magazine.

    Gay Talese has written to the Boston Globe to clarify a comment he made at a Boston University writers conference this Saturday, when he said, “I didn’t know any women writers that I loved.” His attempt at damage control does not seem particularly effective: “My answer was ‘no.’ And it remains

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  • James Hannaham
    April 05, 2016

    James Hannaham wins the PEN/Faulkner Award

    James Hannaham has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his daring second novel, Delicious Foods, a book that, he told the Washington Post, seemed like “such a misfit, but it’s turning out to be a lot more popular than the kid I thought it was.” Hannaham took the opportunity to plead for more literary fiction that’s about something other than “small things that happen to literary people”: “If you look at composers or poets, experimentation is the most fun they can have. What’s wrong with the literary world that there isn’t more respect for and enjoyment of experimentation?”

    Public editor

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