Jess Walter Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has officially filed for bankruptcy in order to restructure 3.1 billion in debt. But HMH has plenty of plans for the future: For one, it will publish Amazon’s new imprint under the New Harvest title. Tonight at the New School, Eric Banks joins Charles Petersen, Joan Wallach Scott, David Nasaw, Mark Alan Hewitt, and others to discuss the controversial “Central Library Plan” and the future of the New York Public Library. Thanks to a new initiative by Esquire, “men’s fiction” may be the next obnoxious category seen in bookstores—or at least on e-readers. The
New Republic editor Franklin Foer When HHhH translator Sam Taylor moved to France eleven years ago, he spoke no French, but decided to learn it and become a literary translator in order to supplement his income as a novelist. Newly minted New Republic owner Chris Hughes has lured former editor Franklin Foer back to edit the magazine. Foer ran the magazine for five years until leaving in 2010. In an interview on Thursday, Hughes told the New York Times that he plans to double the size of the editorial staff (there are currently fifteen employees) and open an office
Robert Draper, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine and GQ, has has been added to John Edwards’s witness list. Draper responded on Twitter: “To Edwards defense team: not sure why I’m on your witness list, but I’m in Libya all month anyway, carry on.” Writer Kyle MacDonald, best known for using the barter section of Craigslist to trade his way up from a red paperclip to a house in Saskatchewan, is making headlines again, this time on Etsy. For 5.67, MacDonald is selling a “de-written” edition of the book Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys To
Chinua Achebe Robert Caro has started a Twitter account. “To be clear,” he writes, “this account will almost certainly never be put to use. It has been reserved, however, ‘just in case.’” Critic Michael Dirda gets candid with Reddit users in an “Ask Me Anything” interview. Among his responses: while he appreciates self-publishing, Dirda thinks that “if you’ve written something that people actually want to read” it will be published by a reputable house. He then goes on to name the worst book he’s ever read as “Judith Krantz’s Dazzle. Even the sex in the book was boilerplate, a
The New Yorker relaunches Book Bench as Page Turner. Prolific Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes died at a hospital in Mexico City on Tuesday at the age of eighty-three. One of the most influential members of the Latin American Boom movement, Fuentes was the author of over thirty books, including The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo, and The Crystal Frontier, as well as a political columnist and essayist. Though he was never granted a Nobel Prize, France did give him a National Order of Merit, the highest award available to civilians, in 1997, and in 1994 Spain gave
Last night the New York Public Library hotsted its ceremony for the Young Lions Award. After Sloane Crosley and Billy Crudup read excerpts by the five finalists, the top honor was presented to Swampladia! author Karen Russell (she is in Berlin, so her brother accepted in her place). Swamplandia was also one of the finalists for this year’s much-dicussed Pulitzer Prize. How did the new owner of the Harvard Book Store figure out a way to compete with Amazon and “solve consumer’s expectations for instant gratification and delivery”? Answer: He installed an Espresso Book Machine, so that when books
Hari Kunzru peruses Richard Prince’s book collection. Is getting profiled in the New Yorker the kiss of death for a director or actor’s career? “To put it mildly, there’s something of a New Yorker feature curse going around Hollywood these days,” Salon’s Alec Nevala-Lee writes, “since the beginning of 2010, the magazine has published eight features on artists best known for their work in film. Two are profiles of Clint Eastwood and Jane Fonda that are basically career retrospectives. Of the remaining six, five of their subjects… experienced significant professional reversals soon after the articles appeared.” The Awl copyedits
Alice Munro Arts journal Her Royal Majesty has reprinted Alice Munro’s first published story, “Dimensions of a Shadow,” after discovering it in the University of Western Ontario’s college literary magazine Folio. The story isn’t available online, but the first few paragraphs are at the Paris Review Daily. Caleb Crain considers the evolution of modern slang: “Like poetry and pornography, slang is easier to recognize than to define.” Today in seventy-year-old scandals: The Guardian has revealed Federico Garcia Lorca’s erstwhile lover to be art critic Juan Ramirez de Lucas. Lorca wrote “passionate verse” to the young critic before the poet
Sara Nelson Sara Nelson, former editor in chief of Publishers Weekly and currently on staff at O Magazine, has been hired by Amazon to help “expand content” on the website. The Irish National Library has digitized rare James Joyce manuscripts and put them online for the first time. The papers, which were closely guarded by Joyce’s grandson, James, entered the public domain last January, and consist of three main parts: The Circe episode of Ulysses, drafts of Finnegans Wake from 1923, and a collection known as the “Joyce Papers,” which span 1903 to 1928. The Irish Times has already
President Obama David Maraniss, the biographer who has chronicled the lives of Bill Clinton, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, among others, turns his attention to President Obama in a forthcoming biography. The new Vanity Fair has an excerpt from the book that focuses on the future president’s days as a Columbia grad in 1980s New York. And while the article’s headline highlights Obama’s “most serious romance yet,” pundits and political opponents will likely seize on his comments about T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland: “There’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism,” Obama wrote. And,
Cheryl Strayed The Irish National Library has digitized rare James Joyce manuscripts and put them online for the first time. The papers, which were closed guarded by Joyce’s son, James, entered the public domain last January, and consist of three main parts: The Circe episode of Ulysses, drafts of Finnegans Wake from 1923, and a collection known as the Joyce Papers which span 1903 to 1928. And the Irish Times has already provided footnotes: “A reader may well be relieved to learn that the Finnegans Wake documents can be safely ignored, or at least left for much later attention;
Joshua Clover Poet and cultural critic Joshua Clover (1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About) and eleven University of California students may face up to eleven years in prison and million in damages for their alleged participation in Occupy Wall Street protests that led to the closure of a U.S. bank on the UC Davis campus. According to a press release, “District Attorney Jeff Reisig is charging campus protesters with 20 counts each of obstructing movement in a public place, and one count of conspiracy.” Davis students have started a petition urging the administration to drop the
David Bowman The creator of Editor Real Talk, the publishing world’s favorite new time-sucking Tumblr, has revealed herself to be GOOD magazine executive editor Ann Friedman. A second issue of the Slate Book Review arrives, with essays by Dan Kois, Choire Sicha, Jen Szalai, Paul Ford, Troy Patterson, and Meghan O’Rourke. Publishers of Poetry of the Taliban, a compilation that was released this month in the UK, are defending their book against charges of “giving voice to terrorists.” The book consisted of 235 poems previously published on the Taliban’s website, including war and love poems. “They would sing and
New digital printing technology that will be unveiled at Düsseldorf, Germany’s drupa exhibition (a quadrennial affair known as “the Olympics of printing”) is said to as capable of high-quality printing as any tablet reader, and could herald a “second digital revolution in printing.” After Orwell, what happened to depictions of poverty in fiction? Roger Crum argues that despite the global recession, “writers show no sign of exploring deprivation or exigency.” One commenter suggests the reason is because “taking a holiday in other people’s misery is no longer as easy a route to literary fame as it once was,” while
Gertrude Stein “Electronic author cooperatives” read self-published e-books so you don’t have to: Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?, Awesome Indies and Rock*It Reads are three collectives that wade through the muck to find books that could go mainstream. Blogger Andrew Crofts speculates that this “hugely encouraging and inspiring model” could provide a solution to “to the great marketing dilemma – how do you get your book talked about and heard about when there is so much competitive din going on all around?” After observing that of “most of the writers I have friendships with… we met online, interact
Jane Bowles Ben Lerner’s excellent novel Leaving the Atocha Station has won the Believer Book Award. A federal judge in Montana has cleared author Greg Mortenson of fraud and racketeering charges surrounding the publication of Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson’s book about building schools in Central Asia. Mortenson was sued last year after journalist Jon Krakauer accused him of exaggerating the story and of using donations from his charity to promote the book. The judge did not rule on whether the accusations were true—only that they were too “flimsy” to form the basis of a lawsuit. Bioeconomics of Fisheries
Heidi Julavits In Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk has opened a museum that mirrors his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence. The University of Southern California has gotten a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to develop a video game based on Henry David Thoreau’s writings about Walden Pond. In the game, “the player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods.” At last week’s London Book Fair, when writers and agents weren’t discussing the fallout from the Justice Department’s charges against e-book publishers, they were signing books deals.
A still from Life of Pi In 2010, Brent Easton Ellis got into trouble for celebrating J.D. Salinger’s death in a tweet. He apologized, but two years on, Alexander Nazaryan argues that Ellis hasn’t gotten any better: “Reading the 538th tweet about how he is going to get stoned and watch The Lorax, you want to fly to Los Angeles, grab the guy by his shoulders and scream at him, ‘STOP TWEETING AND ACTUALLY WRITE SOMETHING.’” Writer and sometimes Harper’ columnist Larry McMurty has announced plans to downsize his Archer City, Texas, bookstore, Booked Up, by 350,000 volumes this